USB Storage Confirmed on Xbox 360

I had been thinking about getting one of their memory cards simply because they're a bit more fail resistant (not that I expect my hard drive to fail) for my profile/saves. (also to bring to a friends house)

But now I can buy however much space $10 gets me and just use that.

My hard drive is a 120 gig drive that I modded to use like any xbox hard drive, they're just laptop drives.

Also last time I checked there's a USB plug in the back of the console as well, so why only 2 devices?

If your going to do something like this, do it right! Give it NTFS or FAT32 support, and let it use the entire storage space!

This can only help Microsoft. I am sure they don't want users saying "I can't buy this game or movie from Xbox Live, not enough space." Kind of silly on their part to be the least bit restrictive when it comes to HD space. Especially when physical HD space is so cheap compared to the revenue they'd miss from selling content.

I can plug any external USB HD into my PS3 right now. I bet MS tries to release some proprietary external drive and charge double to all it's fan-boys. They will use their 360 OS to make sure you can not us just any drive. Mark my words.

Can I download gamesaves then for the XBOX? Let me clarify that I rarely play (too busy) and don't know. But what I do know is there are no good cheat codes anymore that just unlock everything...really sucks. If I play 1 hour a month that is a LOT and I just want all the cool guns and cars right away so I can have a little fun. Having to go throguh the game, earn crap and whatever just turns me off big time. If I could use cheats or gamesaves that would be the best. Anyone have an idea for me? Take Burnout Paradise City...I still have the default car for a year now and that's my favorite game by far, just pick up controller and GO!

i have been a proud xbox 360 owner since its release, but now i am starting to doubt my choice. i think i am just now starting to notice all the bulshitz microsoft is trying to pull and this new arcade thing is such a waste of money. diehard 360 fan starting to consider the competition

I am extremely surprised that any flash drive can work.

*golf clap @ Microsoft*

In my opinion it's essentially irrelevant whether or not a console supports an external hard disk or not, since no external usb harddisk offers either the capacity or transfer rates to support a respectable media library.

Anyone with half an ounce of sense that wants a centralised media storage will have a NAS on a Gbit LAN with a decent amount of upgradeability. I currently run a 4tb NAS that can stream to my 360, and any of my families 4 PC's simultaneously, it also houses all my music and a centralised picassa library.

Whats more, I dont even consider myself a particularly 'power' user, my family definitely arent techophiles, but they do appreciate the unwavering reliability and consistency of such a system. If I was going to be really hardcore about it (and I did consider it) I would have installed a rackmount 'data centre' for the house....

regardless, back on topic, the 360 and PS3 were only ever supposed to be frontends for media collections, if you go down the path of wanting to centralise an entire media collection, you'll quickly run out of space, and quickly be dissapointed. If you only use your HDD for downloadable content, demos and savegames, even the old 60gb hdd on the 360 pro is going to be largely sufficient.

Wasn't there a recent news article about this? Feels like a tv rerun.

Finally, I'm still using the 20 gig lol, who cares if its only about 16 gig a stick support, it still increases my storage by more than double if i use 2

This can only be a good thing! I'm also using the old 20GB HDD with the original Xbox and was actually considering buying the new 60GB HDD. This is good news as long as they do support any flash drive like they say...although it would be very un-Microsoft like!

since protable HDD act simalary to memeory sticks does this mean we may be able too get and extra 500 GB !

HAHAHA, they capped they memory usage 16gig's per flash drive, what a waste, why can't they just use regular external HDD's like the PS3, I have a 500gb external, a 80gb PS3, and a 16gb flash card, and i'm running outta space! I think MS is trying to deter people from purchasing cheap external HDD's so they can continue purchasing there over priced, low density drives.

Why not use a USB Hard Drive? That would be a better choice.

Wow! You guys are being so negative about this. Why would you need more than an extra 16GB or 32GB just to save or back up your gamer tag, downloadable content, saved-game data, possibly a few downloaded movies, and the occasional game demo. These are really the only things going on the xBox storage devices.

For everything else, just plug any size external HDD into a USB port on the xBox 360 and that's it. For those of you here who think that the xBox 360 does not support FAT32 you are wrong. Get any size external HDD and format it with FAT32 and there you go. Keep all of your movies, tv shows, pictures, and music on it and don't worry about it.

Some of you may even be thinking that the partition size limit of FAT32 is 32GB or something like that. That's just a limit Microsoft placed on their NT based OS's (WinNT, Win2k, WinXP, WinVista, Win7) to try and get you to move to NTFS, but Windows 98/ME could create and format a 120GB FAT32 partition (which is still just another limit based on lack of hardware support and testing abilities at the time of Win98/ME's release). All of these limits can be easily overcome with the download of one simple command line tool, easily found with a quick google search, that you can use to format larger size partitions with FAT32. The actual maximum size limit for a FAT32 partition with a sector size of 32KB is about 2TB. Yes that's terabytes. So to sum up, just about any external USB storage solution you buy for your xBox 360 will work in its entirety, if fromatted in FAT32, for everything except storing actual xBox 360 data. For that Microsoft will now allow you to use up to two simultaneous 16GB flash drives to do the trick.

Oh, and they never said you can't use 10, 20, or even 30 16GB flash drives (if you so desire). It's just that you can only have 2 plugged in at the same time.

Why the 16 gig limit? Makes no sense.

@dawgsoverrebs its says limit upto 32GB doesn't say hackers can't make it 500GB maybe you should think outside the box

Anyone blue-ray drive... wasn't that suppose to release Nov 2009

I have the 120 Gig drive and I still have around 40 free.. I don't use marketplace.

I have the old 20 GB(format made it 12 GB)( year old now) and I still have 7 GB left... I don't download a whole bunch of shit because I think its not worth it to have a cluttered 360 with a bunch of useless stuff besides I am a PC gamer where GB/10 cents.

FAT32 is limited to 2GB file size.

An HD movie is bigger than 2GB. And using huge 32k block size means the drive is not making good use of the space. A tiny 2k file will still eat 32k of space.

Its 16GB to store your save games, gamer profile, etc.

In other words they're giving you more than plenty of space for the content intended to go on this partition.

The remaining space on your drive can be seen by your PC and can be loaded up with movies, music, etc, and will be accessible by the 360 as well. So I really fail to see anything negative about this news.

If anything this is a huge boost to 360 arcade owners who go from 512 mb of storage to 16gb. Or original premium owners who get boosted from 20gb to 36gb of storage.

I for one am quite excited by the fact that I can boost my 20gb to 36gb for a reasonable price.

xbox 360 proprietary crap
Defective By Design