Hiya folks , can you use any old external harddrive as additional memory for an xbox360 , or do you have to use a specific type /microsoft/xbox...???

Any SATA drive will work but you'll need to flash the drive in the correct way to work with Xbox's weird file format. Use this guide here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/150970/upgrade_your_xbox_360s_hard_drive_on_the_cheap.html

Edit: Buy em sooner rather than later though, there's a massive shortage of new HDD's atm so the prices on all hdd's are getting higher and higher every day.

ex0 i put a 500gb hdd on my 360 and it said i had to format it yet it only lets you use about 18gb of the drive, why is this?

Its a glossy black slim 360.

MS no longer allows ANY HDD apart from their own offically branded ones to work with the 360

16GB is the limit MS put on for external drives. Legally there is no ay round it.

I think 320 is the limit on internals, phats can just upgrade to 320 in a MS enclosure, dont know if slims have an option.

You can work around the 16gb limit easily enough, will add some more when I get a minute at work.

You can use any drive and make it work, just because MS doesn't like it doesn't make it impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

Okay anyway, since someone dumped a working hdds.bin in September you can hack any drive (with enough space) into an 'official 320gb xbox drive' with a bit of trickery using HDDHACKR.

This is the most user friendly guide which works with the listed western digital drives: clickie. I'm sure there's guides out there for other makes but my googlefu is weak today and anyone interested can find it themselves.

Should be able to find an official hdds.bin from xbins.org. Careful not to brick y0 drive.

Thanks bruh.

Ah, thought the request was for external drives, not to replace the internal ones.

Hm perhaps I misunderstood it. I thought the dude was wanting to use an old external inside his xbox.

Could be either TBH.

Toffeenose, did you mean you mean you wanted to use an external drive as additional storage on your xbox via USB, or to replace the internal drive?

yeah soz... i wanted to plug in an external harddrive as additional storage via usb...thanks

This would suggest that you can but only for specific content: http://www.llamma.com/xbox360/mods/USB%20Hard%20Drive%20Mod.htm

If your xbox is jtagged there's apparently a few hardware hacks that let you disguise an external as an internal but I'm not sure how you'd go about it.

Jtags can use externals formatted to fat32 as normal storage without the 16gb limit, no configuring necessary. The things you cant put on an external are Profiles, the startup programs and DLC.
XBLA, Games, Xbox1 games and Homebrew/Emulators can all go on externals, but they have a limit of 2..2TB as 360's dont support GPT.
There is also the newer RGH hack which also supports slims, its essentially the same as a jtag but a different way of achieving it.

thanks for the responses....Pete