Some third party hard drives can also cause issues as they lack the partition 3 that stored the Xbox emulation and game data. These games will not run if the Xbox 360 does not have a hard drive. The hard drive is the only storage medium that allows for backwards compatibility for original Xbox titles, since these games were reliant on using the hard drive for caching and user storage. If you wish to use your own HDD you must softmod the console, or reflash the hard drive itself to make it appear as a Microsoft drive, for which you are limited to 500GB capacity as this was the largest hard disk Microsoft had released for the 360. Unfortunately you cannot use your own hard drive since it has to be formatted and partitioned using Microsoft proprietary format, and Microsoft has not officially released a formatting tool. This is because the hard disk enclosure was redesigned, on the original models the hard drive was connected either on top or on the side depending on the orientation your 360 console was in, whilst the hard drive for the S model was designed to slot inside the console itself. First was the hard disk design changed from the original models to the S model, whilst the drives are the same internally and could open the case and manually swap the drive over. Xbox Hard Drive: Generally the most popular form of storage since its fast and easy to set up, but there are some caveats. This is because some games may malfunction if they cannot access the data fast enough. Not all devices can be used, USB flash drives that are not fast enough will not be approved for use, since the Xbox 360 performs a speed test when initializing the storage. Ideally you were limited to 4GB of storage, this was later increased to 16GB, then 32GB and then to 2TB following the release of the Xbox One. You can connect a USB memory stick or an external hard drive and use it as additional storage for game saves, DLC or for games themselves (both downloaded and installed of the DVD). USB Mass Storage: This option was introduced around 2010, before the launch of the S consoles. No reason has been given for this as this could allow for the original Xbox saves to be migrated over to the Xbox 360.įor the early 360 models without a hard drive, the NXE made these memory units mandatory, since portions of the dashboard are stored on this memory unit. Even though they both use USB and are formatted to FATX. You cannot use an original Xbox memory unit on the 360, or vice versa. These are not directly compatible with the 360 S models since they lack the ports, however thirds party adapters are available that allow these old memory units to be uses on the S models. Xbox Memory Unit: Offered from 2005 – 2010 and was the primary storage option for the initial core and arcade consoles, available in capacities up to 512GB, designed to be plugged into the front of the 360 and internally use USB, like the original Xbox memory unit. Giving the end user choice may have been a good idea in hindsight, however there were issues and limitations that followed, which will be discussed later. An premium version that had a internal (or sideloaded) hard drive that brought all the benefits of the hard drive in the original Xbox.The user would still have the option to add a hard drive should they run out of space on the memory unit. A basic version that would mirror the storage options of the PlayStation 2/GameCube, where there would be no internal user storage, but an external memory unit would be used instead.With this in mind the 360 would be designed over two storage options: Unfortunately the hard drive in the Xbox was one of the more expensive components of the Xbox, and this was one of the reasons the Xbox never made any profit for Microsoft. For regular users this meant you did not have to worry about memory cards since the Xbox had plenty of internal storage for game saves and since this was on a hard drive rather than NVRAM like the Sega Saturn, which means saves could be lost should the internal battery die. The original Xbox was one of the first consoles to include an internal hard drive as standard which allowed for storage of game saves, music that could be ripped from an audio CD, or DLC that could be downloaded from Xbox Live. To understand the logic of the Xbox 360 storage, you have to look at the past. Looking at both the USB and the storage system of the Xbox, since they are both intertwined and there are differences across the major revisions of the Xbox 360 Background: Xbox Original