I just bought a new WD My Book essential 1 tb hd and for some reason it won't be read by my Xbox. Anyone know if I have to format it a certain way to be read or how to do it?
Agreed, you can either use a proprietary one that attaches to the system, or they now have it where you can use a usb thumb/jump/stick-drive as well but it only goes up to a certain size.
You should be able to use an external drive for photos, videos, and music. (No game data or any Microsoft downloads as the external drive will be read-only.) The drive you have probably needs to be formatted to the FAT32 file system. (You won't be able to store a large file over 4 GBs, though.) Also, if you have an Apple computer, HFS+ should work too. (HFS+ doesn't have the file size limitations like FAT.) EDIT: Looks like you're getting some different advice. Microsoft recently allowed external USB storage to be used for the Xbox, but restricted that to 16GB. Of course that is an option and you'd be able to write from the Xbox to that drive, but I sincerely doubt you would want to use a 1TB drive for that purpose. You can also, as I described, use the entire 1TB drive to hold videos, music, and photos for view on the Xbox. (You would not be able to write from the Xbox, though). I'm assuming this is what you want to do with a drive of that size. If that is the case, don't allow the Xbox to format the drive. Use your computer to format the drive to either FAT (with file size limitation) or HFS+ (with no file size limitation, but you would need an Apple or software like Macdrive on your PC).
You have to use the Microsoft proprietary brand hard drive or can use up too an 16gb external usb flash drive.
No, as mineraljane said, you can use external hard drives too. but you're limited as to how much you can use of it. Roosterteeth tested several hard drives and flash drives. the only thing that I remember not working was one of the flash drives.
You can use Hard disk drives. No matter how big of a drive you use though only 16GB will be formatted and used by the 360 so it's really a huge waste to use one. Unless you have an old junker laying around. I used an old 20GB, works great.
I'm using a WD external drive on my Xbox right now. Go into System > Memory and format the external HDD -even though it will only set up 16 GB of the drive for the system to use, it will erase EVERYTHING on the drive. I got a warning that the drive was usable but that there may be performance issues. But I don't use it as a system drive, I store DL'd videos and demos on it which frees up my poor 20GB to install things like Halo: Reach. I then hooked it backup to my PC and made a backup copy of all my pictures and music which the Xbox will stream. So now I can turn off my main PC so my wife doesn't bitch about it always being on. That negates its being a Windows Media Center Extender, but hell it still doesn't play DIVX in WMC but it plays it outside of WMC. Remember, anything you have on the drive when the Xbox 'prepares' it will be erased. Put the media on there after the Xbox is done with it.
you can put game installations on it. roosterteeth did, and actually had some of the best performance with external hard drives, compared against flash drives that didnt get the warning. pretty much the same speed as the console's own hard drive. that warning is just to cover microsoft in case the hard drive the user uses sucks, I guess.
Do you than have to format the rest of the drive? I have a 1tb does that mean I'll only have 16 gigs and the rest of the drive will just be useless?
