Get the most out of your
Xbox 360 Hard Drive

An Xbox 360 hard drive is not required to play games on the Xbox 360, but it will greatly enhance your gaming experience. The Xbox 360 is the successor to the Microsoft's Xbox which was introduced in 2001. Then in May 2005, Microsoft introduced the Xbox 360 which included the ability to add an external hard drive. This hard drive plugs into the side of the console.

Pulling back on a latch and lifting the drive off the base is all that is required to remove the drive. It can then be plugged into another console or into a merchant’s kiosk. This is useful for saving games and downloading demos, skins, or other enhancements.

The main benefit of getting the hard drive is to store downloadable games and save your scores but part of the hard drive will also be used for a system cache. The hard drive cache will speed up all your games.

The first Xbox 360 hard drive was a Seagate 2.5-inch 20GB laptop hard drive with a Serial ATA interface. At a later date, Microsoft started using Samsung hard drives.

In 2007, Microsoft, introduced the 120GB hard drive. This larger drive is six times the size of the original 20GB but it only costs about twice as much.

The latest and best version of the Xbox 360 is the Xbox 360 Elite. It comes with the largest hard drive and has a sleek black case.

There are three variants of Xbox 360 configurations sold today:

• Xbox 360 Arcade - Doesn't include a hard drive.


• Xbox 360 Premium - Comes with a 20GB hard drive.


• Xbox 360 Elite - Comes with a 120GB hard drive.

Xbox 360 Hard Drive Security Signature

The drive has a special security signature to make it difficult to substitute a higher capacity drive of another type. Although the Xbox 360 security has not yet been compromised to the extent that the original Xbox was, various web sites have sprung up showing people how to replace the original external 20GB with a larger version. Naturally, attempting this operation will void your warranty.

Because the security signature has not been cracked, substituting another drive requires that you obtain a valid security signature from somewhere else. Most likely, this involves copying the signature from an existing drive. The signature contains the hard drive size, so if you were to copy the signature from your 20GB drive to a 120GB model, the new drive would still only have a 20GB capacity.

XBox 360 Hard Drive Mods

If you like to tinker with your hardware, there a site that lists disks that have been successfully substituted for the original Xbox 360 hard drive.

If you're interested in learning more about the Xbox 360 hardware, check out this Xbox repair guide.

Xbox 360 USB Hard Drive Interface

The Xbox 360 has a USB 2.0 interface. This interface can be used to connect an external hard drive. The USB hard drive must be formatted as FAT32. Unfortunately, the USB drive cannot be used to store game files. You can only use it to save media files.

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