I've amassed a very large selection of High Definition movies which I am currently storing on my PC. I have been streaming this videos through Windows Media Center to my 360 console so I can enjoy them on my HDTV. This has been rather troublesome, as transmitting this data --even over a wired network-- has caused some 'hiccups' so to speak when I'm watching a video (occasional pauses to buffer media). That is my secondary problem really though. My primary problem is that I'm running out of space on my hard drive, and rather than upgrade my storage, burn the media to DVDs, or even purchasing an external hard drive for my computer (which would cause even further degradation to streaming, and even video quality) I would much rather place this media on an external drive that I can keep close to my console, excluding my PC from the whole process.

My question is "is it possible to use an external drive to store my media that the 360 will recognize?".

If it is possible "could I get any recommendations on what drive I should purchase?" I am looking for something reasonably cheap, but with a lot of space (dealing with files ranging from 5GB - 8GB).

If it isn't possible, what other methods would you suggest I take to store and transfer my media?

I have an external hard drive that my 360 reads just fine. I have tons of mp3s, and movies that are converted to xvid. They all work great. My external is 120 gigs I think, not sure at the moment.

any external USB drive will work, it does have to be USB, other than that it doesnt matter.

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I happen to have had this same problem a few months ago.

The xbox 360 does not accept any external device (other than the xbox 360 harddrive) that is formatted in nstc.

All USB pendrives are formatted in FAT32... which is why the xbox 360 accepts them.

External harddrives are formatted in NSTC.

Which raises the question.. why not just convert your external HD to FAT32?


Good question, you can.. but when in FAT32 you can only transfer files that are smaller than 4 gb, anything larger than that (like an HD movie file), will not transfer.

So basically Microsoft wins this round unless you want to format your drive and only watch videos smaller than 4gb.

That's my problem, I didn't realized the NTFS thing, I have a 1TB external I just tried hooking up but the 360 didn't register it at all. I wasn't sure if it was too big a drive or something like that. I have like 500gb of data on there so no way I can remove it to reformat it, oh well.

Correct, you've fried the motherboard doing the towel trick. The motherboard is DEAD.