External hard drive problem with Xbox 360

fuzzgun19

My son has an Xbox 360 slim (black), but needed more memory for game saves and the likes. He tried flash drives, but wanted something larger, so I bought this external hard drive.

http://www.tesco.com/direct/toshiba-500gb-usb-30-external-hard-drive/498-4896.prd?pageLevel=&skuId=498-4896

Thinking it was just plug/play.

Well it kind of is, but when plugged in, it says there is only 30 something GB on it (it is 500).

He has some game saves on it, but today inserted Borderlands goty disk 2 in the xbox, and a box came up on the screen saying to plug in a hard drive to continue.
It's already plugged in, so what can the problem be?

GunJack

because the xbox 360 will only recognise and use a max 32GB of USB drive

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/135453/can-you-use-a-usb-to-expand-the-xboxs-storage

fuzzgun19

Thanks I didn't know that. Are all the Xbox models the same?

gjchester

fuzzgun19 wrote: »

Thanks I didn't know that. Are all the Xbox models the same?

For the Xbox 360 yes.

Why is it set at that limit I don't know, possibly as the USB drive was intended for moving game saves to other people system rather than storing all the data, and because USB flash drives (when the 360 was released) were relatively small and could be expensive in big versions.

Could also be because when the 360 was released only some drives hit the required performace level, so limits were put in place to prevent lower grade drives being used and making the console performance look bad.

And yes it could also have been as Microsoft wanted to only permit you to use a "official" drive and so sell you accessories with their markup on them.

GunJack

gjchester wrote: »

And yes it could also have been as Microsoft wanted to only permit you to use a "official" drive and so sell you accessories with their markup on them.

that's the one

fuzzgun19

Ok, so would an Xbox One allow use of other external drives?

GunJack

http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/system/console-doesnt-detect-external-storage

yes....

gjchester

GunJack wrote: »

that's the one

I don't doubt that's part of the reason but remember back in 2005 SATA drives were not common yet and maybe Microsoft didn't want to make a new console look slow by people adding any old hard drive.


Remember that unlike a PC a games console works with specific hardware to the game experience is consistent. By keeping the drivers and interfaces common then for any given game you get the same framerate on every xbox regardless of the hardware unlike PC games were the hardware can really alter the game experience.