I'd been getting nervous about it, thinking I'd have to go drop some exorbitant amount of money on an over-priced, Microsoft-branded harddrive, when they decided to enable storage of Xbox data on USB drives. Since I've got a couple spares lying around, I opted to try it out. Here's what I've learned...
- The Xbox 360 supports only one partition per USB drive, and it should be FAT32.
- Extra partitions can still exist on the drive, for use on other computers, but only the first is used/recognized by the Xbox.
- If you provide an un-partitioned drive, the Xbox 360 will create a filesystem filling the entire drive - which breaks on some systems. I recommend pre-partitioning it.
- When the Xbox 360 "configures" the drive, it creates a directory and occupies/reserves 16gb (or however much you select) for itself - in chunks, since FAT32 doesn't support more than 2gb per file very well.
- The remainder of the space on that partition is available for you to store music, videos, etc - but you'll have to do that from your PC.
While I think Microsoft is (per usual) playing the tyrant with it's 16gb limit, this feature is at least a marginal improvement. It's significant enough for me that I appreciate it.
The technical (filesystem) requirements are specific, but not terribly unreasonable, since the practical benefit of using such a harddrive with an Xbox 360 pretty much ties the drive to the Xbox. Most users shouldn't be too hassled with it.
Improvements I wish Microsoft would make:
- Remove the hokey 16gb limit - it's not a technical limitation, it's a marketing decision.
- Allow games to be installed on the drive completely, not requiring the disc to be present. I don't mind tying the installation to my hardware and the disc (jointly), but I want the convenience of playing without inserting the disc at all!
That's it for now. I'll be playing with my new expanded Xbox 360 storage if anyone needs me...
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