Blogging about stuff

Large (2TB) USB hard drive on Xbox 360

Published on under Blog posts. Tags: ,

I haven’t found any concrete information on the Internet about this, so I’m reporting what I’ve found out about the Xbox’s external hard drive compatibility.

First off, I have an Elite Xbox 360 (Zephyr motherboard) that’s about two years old. I’ve installed the latest Xbox Dashboard with ESPN streaming, which is freaking awesome. I have some large high definition video files larger than 4GB I want to play. I recently bought a 2TB Samsung hard drive from NewEgg, and since I need support for large files, I can’t use FAT32.

I Googled and found that the Xbox supports HFS+, the MacOS extended file system. Perfect! I formatted the drive with Disk Utility on my Mac, and I thought I was good to go. I copied some files over to the new drive and plugged the USB drive into my Xbox, but the Xbox didn’t recognize the drive. Nothing showed up on the Xbox as a connected portable device.

It turns out that Disk Utility partitioned the drive with GPT (GUID Partition Table, the successor to the old MBR (Master Boot Record). So I had to changed how the new drive was partitioned. The usual warning applies: you will lose all data on your drive when you repartition the drive this way!!

Click "Options" in Disk Utility after choosing the volume schema

Select "Master Boot Record" for partitioning options

I guess the Xbox isn’t compatible with GPT. So I repartitioned the drive with MBR, formatted it to MacOS Extended (not journaled). Hooked it up to the Xbox, and bam! Everything works fine.

EDIT: Some other caveats: Even though HFS+ has support for files larger than 4GB, the Xbox is still limited opening files less than 4GB in size. A dumb limitation, IMO, but I can still use the drive for other large files on my Mac.

3 Responses to “Large (2TB) USB hard drive on Xbox 360”

  • Simon

    I was pretty excited to find this post as I have been trying to get HFS+ volumes working with my Xbox again – they were working fine until the fall update that added ESPN and Kinect support. The update made USB storage possible and killed non-iPod HFS support in the process.

    So I partitioned a drive with MBR and formatted for MacOS Extended (not journaled) – but it still isn’t working =(

    Any ideas on what I did differently from you?

  • Greg

    Finally a solution that works… thanks so much for posting this I have been racking my brains trying to figure out why my 360 would not detect my 2TB drive using Mac OS Extended format.

    Now I can finally put all my media on a single drive and connect it to my 360. :)

    • Leave a Reply