Xbox 360 USB HDD Connectivity -- Posted by XanTium on November 29 22:49 EST
From MomDad on allxboxskins.com:
[QUOTE]
Just to further the information mentioned in Llama's recent 360 "mod" (see the 11/29/05 news) of attaching a second HDD, and clear up any misconceptions people might have, it should be noted that generally any IDE->USB and/or SATA->USB adapter can be used on both regular 3.5" and 2.5" IDE/SATA drives.

In the referenced photos, you'll see I have an old 3.5" HDD hooked up to the 360 with a Bytecc BT-200 adapter (which works for 3.5"/5.25"/2.5" drives). Similarly, SATA->USB devices should also work.
Contrary to what some have already started to speculate, sadly you cannot play back video files from the HDD, nor any other formats/codecs that aren't already allowed by the 360's dashboard by accessing the "Portable Device" option. The dashboard limits you to viewing photos and playing music. This is however a nice alternative for those who do not wish to/can't install the Windows Media Connect application or MCE.
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Unfortunately it is true.. after being up for 30 hours working on the thing I didnt eve try loading video to the drive.. figured it was just the same as music and pictures. Then I read some peoples other comments about it not working for them and figured it might have been a bitrate / transfer rate issue. Now that I try it I realize it simply cant happen because the video's applet doesnt even allow browsing of the portable device.

Im hoping this will be one of the first Live delivered upgrades to the 360 dashboard. I cant say it enough; the 360 is great but the media capabilities are nothing to write home about. For now the USB drive support makes me at least almost content with having all of my music.. but in the near future we need to see support for localized media and more media formats. Hopefully Im not the only one that realizes the importance of this or feels the same way. Streaming is a cool feature and all but my 360 is the center of my media experience that I can bring with me wherever I go.

Ok, one question... Is it possible to connect a normal USB-HDD, the ones you can buy in stores, an external USB Harddrive (like 300GB ones) and if so, will my Xbox 360 recognice it as a Portable Device without any problems?

I wouldn't want an unprotected HDD layin around collecting dust and stuff like that.

Just curious.

We've all been there. Long hours.. bad coffee.. can't think..



You still did a rocking good mod. As for the dash.. we'll see more.. count it on. It'll never be XBMC though.

i agree! come on MS everyone wants to watch porn on their box

Yeah. Also the music can it play Mp3's we have on it?

lol. Many have already been able to do that with their modded xboxs

But I'm not sure if M$ will really let us stream video from Windows Media Connect. Seems that they would want ppl to buy a Media Center PC.

Is it possible to install WMC on a regular pc or does it do some sort of hardware checks?

Now someone needs to figure out how to make a sata adaptor for the regular xb360 hd and hook it up to their computer and see if they can view the contents of the drive. Next step would be to see if we could hook up our own hard drives to the expandable hd port and then use it to turn it into a premie system. That would be great.

I hope so.. It is unfortunate that it is so true. I will pray for day when homebrew is reality and XBMC could possibly grace my 360.. I wont be holding my breath for m$ to deliver a whole lot via live any time soon.

I reformatted my pc witha clean Windows XP media center copy on it and had no issues. I have a p4 3.2 with 6800 gt vid card on it.

The down side to this for now is that they way 360's are crashing. Many may want to keep it intact untill M$ fixes/exchanges box, if necessary. M$ is famous for denial and rarely admitting and instead quietly releases patches. Maybe they should have made the 360 with the ability for auto-update on its much needed patches.

now that we can get an external drive onto this thing, which also means flash drives are totally legit on this hardware (correct me if I'm wrong.) Now if we can figure out a format that contains code that can be exploited, such as the Mp3 exploits in Winamp, we can create some Xbox 360 exploits and run homebrew code.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mp3+e...G=Google+Search shows the mp3 exploits they have already, applying this to the 360 hardware would be difficult but feasible.

- there is always a pinhole no matter how secure a piece of hardware is.

btw. You dont need a SATA adapter to hook the 360 drive up to your PC. All you need is a SATA connection and a SATA power connector. Some newer PC's from dell already have the SATA power connector inside. Then you just plug in the SATA cable and power cable and it should work. Theres no hardware locking going on. The drive is funtional and appears to be operating completely. I dont have the desire to re-partition it to prove it works.

I dont think it will be any time soon that we see a "real" replacement hard drive hack for the 360. I think there is a whole lot of encryption and hypervisor bla bla sha boing boing goin on which is probably multi-level and dificult to circumvent.. though I dont want to underestimate Maybe its just a fatx partition and it would just work in a xbox 1.. doubt it.. After seeing that m$ gives us absolutely NO option to store our stuff on it I dont see a reason to buy the sata to ide adapter to find out or spend any more time at all to find that I cant do anything with it anyways.

Im sure one day we will have what we want... mod or not. I was just hoping ms would come through on the media capabilities.

Might I ask, why is this news?

This is just the same as plugging in a USB key or any other sort of USB mass storage device.

Its not news.. people may have thought it was more "mod" than it really is. Xantium was clearing up the fact that this is not some uber hack trick by llamma it can be done by anyone with almost any drive pretty easily. The only thing that makes this "mod" is the internal implementation of it.

All you need is a USB to ATA or SATA adapter and a matching drive. If its larger than 32GB you will need Partition Magic or some other utility to create the large FAT32 partition and format it. Its that simple. Works with your PC or 360.

This is the one we used in the blue box. Its nice and small and would be great externally also.
USB 2.0 Laptop Drive Caddy

The USB port does not fully adhere to USB spec. It spits out over 2A of current. I can power an external notebook drive directly from the 360's USB port. The same device needs external power when used with a PC

Dave

Could you use the HDD for Backwards compatiblity? The premium models have the drive on them which I assume emulates XYZ drives with page files or something, can you do that with any standard USB device, including a USB hdd?

Anyone even try? lol

man xbmc with ooba is awesome for that u can just download those sweet videos in less than 10 secs man man man thats so cool its the best script in xbmc.

sw33t partition magic 8 changed my external HDD to FAT32. Now my XBOX360 can play my serveral thousand mp3 collection off the HDD.

This also shows xbox360 is more open for different kinds of hacks...
We will hack the shit out of this system as well

No, that is why I was worried when there was talk of this "mod" because people will start to think this is something other than what it is... All this post is doing is saying that you can play mp3's and pictures. Afaik, USB devices cannot be written to from the 360.

a litlle confused over here

Does this mean I can buy the Core package and hook-up my own HDD ?
Like in I-would-save-myself-100€-and-make-use-of-that-HDD-in-my-old-laptop ?

thanx,
k.

No, it means you can store mp3s and pictures. If you want to save video, play emulated xbox games, etc. you still need the Ms version....for now

I have an ordinary 250GB External USB 2.0 HDD for my PC ... can I just connect it to my xbox 360 without any problems? Someone said something about only having MP3 or Pictures on it will work ... what about Xvid, DivX, MPEG or AVI movies? They won't work?

currently.. when connecting devices, including USB HD's or IDE HD's in USB inclosures, The Xbox360 will only play, see, and stream Photos and MP3's from it.

If this changes, it will be in a future dashboard update from MS.

Dash updates are expected roughy quarterly, more often if possible.

Is it only FAT32 support? Why not NTFS? If I wanted to use my removable HD with a 360, it'd be in NTFS to handle all of my giant DVD ISO backups. Even if I can't use that sort of stuff on my system, I'd want to be able to leave it on there.

Sorry, FAT32 only.

I guess you could just have your external HDD in FAT32 format...Is there a problem with that ? This is because I am planning to buy a USB HDD for my pc and put some music on it. I can easily have it in FAT32, can't I?

Thanks,

Daffy

ok..i just tried my external 2.5 HDD and it works perfectly....however, i turned off the system and it seems like my external HDD is still on...(ie: power light is still on and green)

is it suppose to be like that?

Yeah, it does it on mine too. The problem is that the 360 supplies usb power even when it is "off". The only way i could think of fixing it would be to turn it off at the wall or put a big switch on the power supply Or just put a switch on the 5v usb line i guess...

Or if someone makes an "intelligent" usb caddy, that can halt power when the disk isn't being read/written etc...

hi

I can not get my Xbox360 to recognise my External USB HDD

i brought a 40G hdd
i created a new partition, format in fat32 (using partition magic)
works perfectly on computer
although it show up in the Hard Disk Drives section of My Computer, not the Devices with Removable Storage section

the XBox360 will not recognise it
it shows me that there is NO portable device attached
i've tried it on the front USBs and the back one

the only difference i have to photos etc
is that i have the hdd in a USB External HDD Cabby

but shouldn't it still work ???

can anyone help
thanks

HAHAHAHH WORDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

I can't get my USB hdd or an iPod nano to show up on the xbox 360.
Whats weird is only a few days ago they worked fine and I played mp3s from both with no problems.
The hdd and nano work fine on a pc and haven't had anything changed since they did work etc.

Is there something im overlooking?

Incase anyone else has the same problem, to solve the ipod/hdd not showing up problem I just unplugged the xbox for a few minutes and then turned it back on.
Not sure why... but it works now.

Sorry to bump an old topic, but does the HDD streaming mp3's mean you can play them in Custom Soundtrack mode? Or simply in a playlist whilst on the dashboard?

I noticed lately that there is DivX and XVid support on 360's now, so would that mean that movies can now be put on the HDD, and played through the 360?

I have got a Mac Mini Intel Core Solo 1.5GHz running OS X Leopard 10.5.2. I formatted an external Maxtor 320GB usb HDD to read on an Xbox 360 using "Disk Utility" under the "Utilties" under "Appliactions".

The settings were:
.select partition tab under the usb hdd
.select '1 Partition' under volume scheme
.give it a meaningful name like 'media'
.under format menu select 'Mac OS Extended'
.under options button select 'Apple Partition Map'
.click 'Apply'

Now copy some media to test on the xbox 360.
all should work.

This is not to go against the excellent guides done by the Windows guys. BOTH METHODS WORK WELL.