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Xbox 360 Preview Program: 360 now supports 2TB External Hard Drives

Can we turn this thread into the official Best External Drive for 360 thread?

Would be nice to see a dedicated thread for the 360 on external HDDs and thumb drives with performance comparisons, but it may not be have many posts at first due to the limited number of Preview participants.
 
Does anyone know if this feature works with these two things:

  • Original Xbox game playback - don't these only work with MS HDDs and not USB thumb drives right now?
  • Xbox 360 games that say HARD DRIVE REQUIRED (as opposed to STORAGE REQUIRED) and won't currently accept a USB memory stick for installations (Battlefield 4, Destiny, or MGS5:GZ, for instance)?

OG Xbox requires the MS HDD.

there's a partition on the drive that is a stripped down clone of the original Xbox OS and it's needed for playing Xbox games. that's also why many cloned drives that appeared didn't work with OG Xbox games, the cloners would partition the drives properly, but were not taking the time out to put that filesystem back, they were just leaving it empty.
 
i hope that they add a "ready to install list" to Xbox 360 that shows games that you own that aren't currently installed. something that would be exactly like how it functions on Xbox One:
6da8f0c1-c447-4c32-bdea-6a0a4180dc7a.png

I have so many 360 downloadable games (especially with Games with Gold now) that I sometimes lose track. It would be nice to quickly view what I own without having to login to backloggery or something.

EDIT: i found a link on Xbox Feedback for it. please vote for it so that we could make it happen!


Voted and commented. Let's make it happen.
Only at 63 votes right now. SOOOOO wish they would consider good feedback suggestions instead of just vote counts :(

OG Xbox requires the MS HDD.

there's a partition on the drive that is a stripped down clone of the original Xbox OS and it's needed for playing Xbox games. that's also why many cloned drives that appeared didn't work with OG Xbox games, the cloners would partition the drives properly, but were not taking the time out to put that filesystem back, they were just leaving it empty.

Found this on reddit, here's partition 2. Normal 3RD party drives like WD works like a charm I reckon for all marketplace content, including originals.

Also, the advantage of 7200 RPM drives as opposed to 5400 by the official drives by MSFT. Dunno if this 3rd party HDD discussion is frowned upon here on GAF though.
 
How fast is USB compared to the stock HD?

I wasn't able to tell, honestly. I've since replaced that 128GB flash drive with a 320GB external HDD using a Y cable plugged into the back of the 360 and it's working fine. I DID try to compare the speeds between the flash-drive and the USB hard drive. Writing to the external device was faster on the HDD, but reading data seemed about the same on both. Basically what you would expect. My feeling is that the USB2.0 interface is the bottleneck when it comes to reading data off the external drives, and I would expect the internal drive to perform better because of this, but I haven't tested it.
 
So I was extremely bored and wanted to do a couple of comparison tests between my original 250GB HDD from 2010-ish, Patriot Supersonic Rage USB 3.0 , and a Kingston DataTraveler 101 G2 USB 2.0 flash drive.


CrystalDiskMark

Patriot USB 3.0 connected to a USB 2.0 port
bToOBwz.jpg
uMdNe7i.jpg




Kingston USB 2.0
9wJL3CR.jpg
xSdcIyS.jpg





Gears of War Judgement
Loaded first level through Level Select and stopped timer once cutscene began
HDD: 10.46
Patriot: 11.12

Child of Light
Loaded first level save
HDD: 14.73
Patriot: 17.23

The Witcher 2
Loaded a Rough Landing save
HDD: 17.34
Patriot: 21.00

Torchlight
Loaded a save that was pretty far along.
HDD: 28.62
Patriot: 28.05

Dark Souls
Loaded the beginning of a New Game+ save
HDD: 8.29
Patriot: 7.17

State of Decay
Loaded first area save
HDD: 45.60
Patriot: 43.54

World of Tanks
This game shows the biggest differences. I don't recall having these long of loading times prior to the most recent patch, so it could a bug?

From the "Play" screen to loading up the garage (skipping WarGaming screen on all tests)
HDD: 1:43.78
Patriot: 1:04.96
Kingston: 1:04.84

Loading a match from garage after initial load. Time started once a match was found. Unfortunately, there isn't a sure way of getting onto the same maps for testing, so loads varied based on levels.
HDD: 3:20.67
Patriot: 37.36
Kingston: 44.73

Exiting post-game screen and loading another match from the garage showed little difference between flash drives.
HDD: 2:55.94
Patriot: 46.36
Kingston: 43.42


All loading tests were done at least 3 times (some had more just to be certain) and were within the same second. The BF1943 and Torchlight Kingston tests are not shown due to, well, both USB drives were nearly identical so I decided not to save their times.


Write speed test: HDD to Patriot USB drive - These ranged from 14MB/s to 17MB/s

World of Tanks - 5:57.09 - 5 files totaling 5.2GB

Battlefield 1943 - 40.85 - 561MB

Child of Light - 1:43.15 - 1.5GB

Gears of War Judgement - 8:09.18 - 7.1GB

State of Decay - 2:06.73 - 1.9GB

The Witcher 2 - 8:02.19 - 7.1GB

Torchlight - 16.71 - 198MB

Dark Souls - 4:26.93 - 3.9GB


Write speed test: HDD to Kingston USB drive

World of Tanks - 28:34.63 😭
 
It's out for everyone now. Just got it and my 750GB laptop HDD I plugged in using a makeshift esque adapter got me 698GB :D I used to live off of about 160GB, my internal is a 120GB. This will be so nice. I'm gonna start installing most of my games and having all those Games with Gold titles ready to roll whenever I feel like. Probably will actually get around to playing them now :D :D :D
 

Daigoro

Member
It's out for everyone now. Just got it and my 750GB laptop HDD I plugged in using a makeshift esque adapter got me 698GB :D I used to live off of about 160GB, my internal is a 120GB. This will be so nice. I'm gonna start installing most of my games and having all those Games with Gold titles ready to roll whenever I feel like. Probably will actually get around to playing them now :D :D :D

serious?

awesome. gotta fire up the ol 360 today. ive had to delete so much stuff over the past several months...
 

Vert boil

Member
Woohoo!!

Weird, there was a second update when you check the new setting options. It seems to just install a version of IE that is just for xbox live stuff. Probably more to it but *shrug*.

Update details (Shitty pic warning)
 

Terra

Member
So great! Need to dig out the Box and try this out as soon as possible.
Too bad I have a 2009 fat Xbox Arcade. It's doomed, right?
 
Little late, huh?
0514141727_zps3ad235f3.jpg

Love the OG Xbox

Voted and commented. Let's make it happen.
Only at 63 votes right now. SOOOOO wish they would consider good feedback suggestions instead of just vote counts :(

Found this on reddit, here's partition 2. Normal 3RD party drives like WD works like a charm I reckon for all marketplace content, including originals.

Also, the advantage of 7200 RPM drives as opposed to 5400 by the official drives by MSFT. Dunno if this 3rd party HDD discussion is frowned upon here on GAF though.

We just gotta keep spreading the word!
 

Omikaru

Member
Haven't had a 360 since 2012. Still have a few exclusives on that system which I like (Lost Odyssey, Dead Rising, Tales of Vesperia). Maybe I should grab a 4gb slim system and use this with one of my portable HDDs instead of forking out for the 500gb system.
 

RPS37

Member
Anyone have any suggestions as to which portable HDD I should get for my 360? My 250GB has been pretty full for a while now.
 

twinturbo2

butthurt Heat fan
I went ahead and got a 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable drive from Best Buy for $90 (plus taxes, minus a $5 My Best Buy coupon) in preparation. Now, where do I get the y-adapter? Any suggestions? This thing is USB 3.0, but it's backwards compatible with USB 2.0. It's bus-powered, though, and I don't know if it works with the X360's ports without a y-adapter.
 
I went ahead and got a 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable drive from Best Buy for $90 (plus taxes, minus a $5 My Best Buy coupon) in preparation. Now, where do I get the y-adapter? Any suggestions? This thing is USB 3.0, but it's backwards compatible with USB 2.0. It's bus-powered, though, and I don't know if it works with the X360's ports without a y-adapter.

You shouldn't have a problem using it as-is
 
I have one problem...
After moving all my content to my external HDD (500GB), it worked well for a few days, until today: I realized that I only had 3 games (they were intalled on my x360 internal HDD) and didn't recognized my external HDD.
I unplugged it from the back of the console and choose the 2 USB port on the front: had the same result: my external HDD appears as "A non formatted drive".
I cleared the cache of x360 but had the same results...
That drive had almost 120 games and savegames... :(
Suggestions?
 

twinturbo2

butthurt Heat fan
I got around to formatting my drive and I'm chucking all my stuff onto it without a problem. My question is, is there a way to default my downloads onto the external drive?
 
I have one problem...
After moving all my content to my external HDD (500GB), it worked well for a few days, until today: I realized that I only had 3 games (they were intalled on my x360 internal HDD) and didn't recognized my external HDD.
I unplugged it from the back of the console and choose the 2 USB port on the front: had the same result: my external HDD appears as "A non formatted drive".
I cleared the cache of x360 but had the same results...
That drive had almost 120 games and savegames... :(
Suggestions?

Does your PC recognize it?
 

Shpeshal Nick

aka Collingwood
I got around to formatting my drive and I'm chucking all my stuff onto it without a problem. My question is, is there a way to default my downloads onto the external drive?

Don't think so. Sucks. I've been defaulting to internal, then have to copy. Draining.
 
Hmm... HDD may be a goner.
Do you have another enclosure you could test it with?

Yes, I have another. I changed them but the result was the same.
HDD not recognized in Windows and unformatted in x360.
I suspect you might be right... RIP my external HDD (and my games and savegames).
 

twinturbo2

butthurt Heat fan
Don't think so. Sucks. I've been defaulting to internal, then have to copy. Draining.

I know I have the option presented to me when I go to download something, but having it default to the external would be a good time saver.

At least I can copy everything in one go, but that's way too time consuming if there's a lot of large files on the drive.
 
In addition we will also no longer reserve space in advance on your hard drive. If you are using 16GB of games – we will only take 16GB of space
Why can't they do the same thing in XBOX ONE?

Reserving 100-150GB (16-22% for 500GB/1TB models) of HDD space is ridiculous...
 
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