One of the real limitations of the xBox 360 is its hard drive. Currently, the additional "official" 60 GB hard drive for the xBox 360
sells for around US $100.00. Most of us already know that 60GB hard drives come much cheaper than that. If only there was a way to connect other, cheaper hard drives to our xBox 360, we could save a lot of money and not be slaves to Microsoft.
Update: Xbox 360 120GB Hard Drive now available.
Luckily, there are already some hacks that will allow you to do just this. Here's an introduction to a couple of the favorites.
xBox 360 Hard Drive Hack #1 - The USB Adapter Hack
If you don't want to mess around with the inside of your xBox, you can take advantage of the 360's USB port to add extra memory to your system cheaply and easily. What you need to do is find any USB storage device, or a hard drive that supports a USB 2.0 adapter. In this case, you'll also need to get the adapter too.
Now you have to put your drive together with the USB adapter and plug it into your PC. With Windows XP, installation should be automatic, but older versions of Windows may require you to install a driver for your particular adpater first.
If your hard drive is less than 32GB, you can just go to the "Administrative Tools" section of your Control Panel and use the "Computer Management" function to create FAT32 partition on your drive. When that's finished, follow through with formatting. Keep in mind that larger drives will require a 3rd party partition software, since Windows does not support these options on anything larger than 32GB.
Finally, load whatever media you want to access with your xBox onto your newly formatted hard drive. Unplug it from your PC and connect it to your 360. From your xBox menu, go to Media, then to "portable device". You should see all the content available.
xBox 360 Hard Drive Hack #2 - The Western Digital SATA BEVS HDD Hack
Some hackers are reporting that you can format and install a much cheaper Western Digital SATA BEVS hard drive into your xBox 360 instead of the pricey Microsoft version. This requires downloading a software tool that will help copy important "signature" information from the xBox onto your Western Digital hard drive, so when you install it in your xBox 360, it won't be rejected by the machine. Besides being a cheaper option, the fact that you can install this internally is a nice touch. On the other hand, you have to be a bit of a tech-geek to do the formatting and installation. Also, you are still limited to just an additional 20GB of memory.
If this interests you though, and you're not worried about opening your xBox 360 and voiding the warranty, just do a search for the tool called "HDDHacker" by TheSpecialist.
Unfortunately, Microsoft makes it very difficult to use cheaper alternatives to increase the memory on your xBox 360. Lucky for us though, this just makes the hackers more inventive and they will likely continue to find quicker, easier and less expensive ways to mod the xBox 360. In the future, maybe Microsoft will wise up to what its customers really want and make it easier to add a hard drive of your choice to your machine. Until then, keep checking the xBox 360 homebrew websites to keep up on the latest hacks.
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