Quick question RE: 360 and hard drives

Ripper · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:05

Having recently got a wireless router I hardly touch my main PC and use my laptop all the time, and the main PC now stays off rather than being on 24/7. Previously, with this PC being on all the time, I could stream music to my 360. Now obviously I cant without turning my PC on (other end of the house).

So my question is, could I buy a USB hard drive, whack all my music onto it and then just leave it plugged into my 360 so I can use that for music? I'm pretty sure I can since the 360 picks up music off my ipod and flash drive, but i thought i'd check.

JUMPURS · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:06

Yeah you can do that with a USB drive. You only need to hook it up to your PC to add music to it.

Ripper · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:08

What about powering the drive? Will the 360 do this? Or do external USB drives require power leads etc? (never had one before)

Sirrel Squirrel · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:20

They all need a power lead

JAMAL · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:20

If its a laptop hard disk the 360 will power it, but 3.5 require their own power.

I had a western digital 250g mybook on mine and it worked a treat, they can be had at a pc store for £58 at the moment.

Felix E · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:20

I *think* they require external power, mine certainly does. Isn't there something about formatting with the 360 though? I tried to connect my 200gb ntfs drive to my 360 and it didn't see it.

NokkonWud · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:25

If you got something like a 4gb USB Stick that would work without a opwer lead. Something like an iPod also works.

Ripper · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:30

Western Digital 60GB Passport Drive USB2.0 5400RPM 2MB Cache
http://image.******.com/UK/P0117581_C0000004_P0000000.jpg

I like the look of that one, powered by USB bus, should work fine yeh?

NokkonWud · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:36

Should work fine, yes. I was looking at one of these before, they do look superb.

Bonjour · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:51

Sirrel Squirrel said:
They all need a power lead

I have a caddy which doesn't. Instead, it plugs into 2 usb ports to draw enough juice.

Sirrel Squirrel · 11 Mar 2007 at 12:57

I stand corrected

Jofujofu · 11 Mar 2007 at 13:20

Ripper^ said:
Western Digital 60GB Passport Drive USB2.0 5400RPM 2MB Cache
http://image.******.com/UK/P0117581_C0000004_P0000000.jpg

I like the look of that one, powered by USB bus, should work fine yeh?

I've got one, and yes it works fine!

Only problem is that the drive doesn't power down when you turn the 360 off.

Paul

Ripper · 27 Dec 2007 at 21:02

Jofujofu said:
I've got one, and yes it works fine!

Only problem is that the drive doesn't power down when you turn the 360 off.

Paul

Thread revival, never ended up getting one but I'm considering it again. Why doesn't it power down? It'd be in my bedroom so I wouldn't want it being on all the time when i'm trying to sleep :confused:

Also, is there any problems with storing loads of data on them, I read that because its fat32 it'll only read so much?

Phil99 · 27 Dec 2007 at 21:20

The 360 provides power to the USB when it's 'off' (the same way most PCs do) so the drive will stay running.

The 360 wont read NTFS formatted disks so you have to use FAT32 or HFS+. FAT32 has the limitations of a 4GB max file size and XP only allowing you to have up to 32GB per partition (more with 3rd party software), and HFS+ isn't a native Windows format so you have to use 3rd Party software, usually at a cost, to format and access files on it from your PC.

SiD the Turtle · 27 Dec 2007 at 23:23

Be careful. A lot of these 2.5 inch drives require 1000mA of power to spin the platters, USB is only rated to supply 500mA, which is why some come with splitters that draw power off of two ports. Most PCs don't have a problem providing this much power to the port regardless, but I have no experience of if the Xbox does or doesn't.

I'm guessing you won't have any issues though.