Connecting A 3tb External Usb Drive To An Xbox 360?, WD My Book Essential 3.0 3 TB External Hard Drive (USB 3.0/2.0) Options

[rattyjunk]

I maybe should have done a bit more reading up on the matter, but based on a couple of posts on some random forum I decided to buy the following drive WD My Book Essential 3.0 3 TB External Hard Drive (USB 3.0/2.0). It was the general consensus in this post that you just plug it in and it will work, the only stipulation was it needed to be fat 32.

It has yet to arrive in the post for me to test, but while I was waiting I dicovered other posts saying that the 360 will not be able to read the whole drive and that the max storage that it will see is 2.2 TB.

I know 2TB drives work fine, but I wanted a definative answer to whether the 360 will except the drive or not.

Thanks in advance

[Khaine]

From the Microsoft website.

"FAT32 supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size."

Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310525

So your 3TB drive can only be formatted to 2TB for use with a 360.

[rattyjunk]

Just a thought, could I do 2 partitions eg one 2tb and one 1tb.

Would that work??

[DodgeM4s]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;q184006

The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).

Also.

http://www.infocellar.com/software/Format-...4k-Clusters.htm

I dont know much about hdd's so it might be a good idea to wait untill someone clever can confirm that doing this is safe and wont brick your hdd. Also, not sure if you could use the My Books because they have that damn virtual CD built into their firmware.

[rattyjunk]

Well I've read else where some people having success with this drive using a program called fat32format, but I'm skeptical.. We will see

Thank you guys for the info

This post has been edited by rattyjunk: May 15 2011, 07:01 PM

[Khaine]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;q184006

The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).

Actually the limitation is still 2TB, even though it's theoretically 8TB,

"In order to overcome size limit of FAT16, while at the same time allowing DOS (disk operating system) real mode code to handle the format, and without reducing available conventional memory unnecessarily, Microsoft expanded the cluster size yet again, calling the new revision FAT32. Cluster values are represented by 32-bit numbers, of which 28 bits are used to hold the cluster number, for a maximum of approximately 268 million (228) clusters. This allows for drive sizes of up to 8 TiB with 32 KiB clusters, but the boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting volume size to 2 TiB on a hard disk with 512 byte sectors."

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

@rattyjunk I don't think PS3's and 360's can deal with dual-partition external HDD's.

[DodgeM4s]

Actually the limitation is still 2TB, even though it's theoretically 8TB,

Above confuses me because I don't understand the rest of it. Might do some reading as it looks pretty interesting

[Khaine]

Above confuses me because I don't understand the rest of it. Might do some reading as it looks pretty interesting

It's actually something I want to look into a bit more as well.

From what I understand, the limitation is 2TB because the boot sector of a drive can only be X size due to a limitation with FAT32. The maximum boot sector will therefore report the drive as 2TB, even when it's bigger. So if some clever bugger managed to hack FAT32 so it was still recognized as such, but allowed the boot sector to be bigger, then up to 8TB drives could be used.

Honestly, I'm very surprised an NTFS driver hasn't been developed for JTAG consoles yet. My LG Blu-Ray player can read NTFS formatted USB drives, and my PS3 on CFW3.55 can read NTFS formatted external drives too (but only through Multiman).

[caaraa]

thanks guys

[Wagmen]

what about telling the computer to do a FATex format?
im trying right know on my 3tb WD My book Essential. sure is taking a long time.
before this my xbox keeps saying device not recognized after this reformatting i dont know what the results will be.
the xbox i have is a slim chrome edition with 200gigs

its been 30 minutes and its only got 5% through its going to be a long night.

[lordvader129]

what about telling the computer to do a FATex format?
im trying right know on my 3tb WD My book Essential. sure is taking a long time.
before this my xbox keeps saying device not recognized after this reformatting i dont know what the results will be.
the xbox i have is a slim chrome edition with 200gigs

its been 30 minutes and its only got 5% through its going to be a long night.

360 wont read exFAT, only FAT32

[EatonZ]

Honestly, I'm very surprised an NTFS driver hasn't been developed for JTAG consoles yet. My LG Blu-Ray player can read NTFS formatted USB drives, and my PS3 on CFW3.55 can read NTFS formatted external drives too (but only through Multiman).

I wouldn't get your hopes high on that one. The specification is not released publicly. You have to pay big $ to license it from MS. And making a proper implementation takes years, based on a few PC drivers I have seen.

To answer the question, if you format with a different cluster size, 3 TB should work on the console. See if FAT32Formatted will let you do that.

[CaptainX]

I am currently using a 1TB that is formatted as Mac OS Extended File System (HFS+) on my XBox360. So FAT32 isn't the only file system that the XBox360 will recognize. It eliminates the 4GB file size limit of FAT32. I haven't tried it on a 3TB drive yet though.

[thesilentprice]

My 3 TB shows up as 2040 GB on my RGH, would be great if you get the full 3TB!