Xbox 360 Updates Allow USB Flash Drive Support

April 6, 2010 By Ryan Fleming

Microsoft announces an upgrade for existing Xbox 360 members that will allow you to save profiles and game information to a USB flash drive.

Microsoft has recently issued an update to the Xbox Live network that will allow users to use USB flash drives for storage. Xbox owners will be able to attach their own flash drives to save profiles, game save data, or XBL Arcade downloads.

Microsoft is also planning on selling its own pre-configured, 8GB SanDisk drives that come with one month of XBL Gold subscription service, but Xbox’s support has issued a step-by-step walkthrough on how to configure any USB, FAT32 formatted flash drive to work.

The configuration allows you to reformat a drive and make it Xbox ready, or set aside a portion of the drive to be reserved for Xbox information. Despite the limit of the FAT32 system, the update will allow users far more flexibility on storage.

With the move by Microsoft to release several games online, including the recent announcement of platinum sellers “Fable II” and “Fallout 3” to be sold as digital downloads, plus the release of the 250GB hard drive for the Xbox, the future of the console seems to be heading more and more towards digitally released content.

Showing 23 comments

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Marc at 1:33pm 19th November 2010 Heck I use a 2 gb flash drive, and it works just fine....it's the mb's that the x-box 360 mostly uses anyway...
meow at 12:09pm 11th November 2010 can u use flash drives for a 4GB xbox 360?
Dazza at 12:56pm 12th September 2010 Hi is there a way to play my .avi files from my usb everyime i try it say upgrade but i dont have live? is there a downloadable upgrade that i can put on a disk?
Hunter at 8:33am 18th August 2010 If you have a 250 or 500gb usb It will only use 16gb's. I think that the xbox website should make a update for at least 250gbs.
daniel at 1:05am 8th August 2010 how do we get all the memory of our games on to the USB's
daniel at 1:04am 8th August 2010 hey everyone me and my brother both have 16gig USB's but when we insert them the red light comes on for about a second but then it turns off
Matt at 4:19pm 20th May 2010 Did you ever learn to use a period at the end of sentences?
Gene Simmonslol at 7:05pm 26th April 2010 But why does the total size of all the files in that folder equal the size of my flash drive?
1. Steven Jean at 8:08pm 24th July 2010 sorry if im late. before configuring it , you gotta use customized... i just realise it! hope i helped
james braselton at 12:50pm 26th April 2010 hi there Gene Simmonslol i have the reason you can not have acess flash memory has 3 areas were data is keept and the user has acess too only 1 part of the usb flash drive or ssd flash drives
Gene Simmonslol at 1:19am 19th April 2010 Is there any way to access the files if you plug the flash drive into your computer? The computer says the flash drive has no free space, but if you enable viewing hidden files and folders you'll see that there are files that most likely contain the data targeted for fiddling. I guess what I'm asking is whether or not someone can go into the flash drive and edit their saves?
james braselton at 5:09pm 17th April 2010 hi there morris you are right about microsfot cappping the usb fllash drive too 16 gb per unit for 32 gb usb flash drive but third parrty usb flash drives might not have software about the cap and you get more useage like on you tube they show them useing a 2 tb usb hdd but they both use usb soo thats why dont think the cap would work soo here what i would do i would use microsoft scan disk 16 gb usb flash drive untill all full and i will try find a cheap 32 gb or 64 gb on sell and if i get looky with a bigger usb flash drive i will report back with my finding becuase i saw you tube showing 16 gb usb flash drives on the xbox 360 along with the 2 tb usb hdd i will only buy bigger usb flash drives if i fill up 2 16 gb usb flash drives curently i have a single 20 gb hdd and have 10.4 gb free space soo me filling up 32 gb with 2 16 gb usb flash drives will take forever it will take me 10 years or longer too fill 32 gb becuase i am still useing a comadore with 64 killobytes of memory kb like microsoft also put a cap on netbook ssd capacity too only 64 gb now have 128 gb ssd thats why no one wants a netbook any more every one wanted ssd netbooks but microsoft decided every one wants hard drive netbooks thats why every one is buying up ipads with ssd flash drives soo if the cap stay microsoft probaly loss many more customers soo the cap probbaly wont last but 16 gb is bigger then the 15 gb hard drive from wii2 or wii hd or ziii at least from the latest nintendo news plus japan has a sony ps3 powered buy a intel 80 gb ssd global ipads sells reach 21,000,000 buy 2012
mikekearn at 1:35pm 14th April 2010 You can install games to the USB drive just like you can the HDD, but you still need the game disc in the tray for it to work. The only benefit to installing your games is that it reduces wear on your system and can (sometimes) decrease load times.
BG at 1:39pm 13th April 2010 What about storing games I bought on a disc? If I bought, say Forza 3 on a disc because I wanted the items that came with the LCE pre order edition (which includes a 2 GB flash drive), can I install the game to a flash drive and not have to grab my disc every time I want to play it? That would be the biggest benefit for me, to be able to sit on the couch and switch between my favorite games without having to get up and switch discs all the time. My son isn't old enough to do this for me yet. :-)
Morris at 6:49am 13th April 2010 Hey James, I thought the same thing except Microsoft thought of this possibility and decided to cap the storage limit of any flash drive to 16gbs before they start losing money to flash memory revenue...

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/storage/default.htm
james braselton at 10:01am 7th April 2010 hi there why is a 250 gb hard drive a big deal i would order a lighting fast kingstong 256 gb usb flash drive 6 gb more and all flash memory too bad there is not 4 usb ports or i would go for a quad 256 gb usb flash drives over 1 terabyte of flash memory storage corsair also has a 128 gb usb flash drive as well while 8 or 16 gb flash drives are amazing i can not wait for multi-terabyte usb flash drives come too market
Andrew Beehler at 5:25pm 6th April 2010 HI Dark - I knew that the memory card would work as well. It was really just out of my own laziness and not wanting to have to buy a memory card. I already keep an 8 gig USB drive on my key chain, so this now solution is much more convenient..... and very welcomed.
yomammy at 5:23pm 6th April 2010 Who cares when they can't make a reliable console. Mine 360 got the RROD months ago & is useless now, even with the newer designed larger heatsink. I won't buy another .Maybe if they make a better x box in the future that runs cooler. Now it's wii & 360 sometimes for me.
1. TORCUTT at 6:21pm 9th August 2010 All new models post 2007 are fixed...yu get the RRoD thats a user faulire not a technical one..plus they extendend all warrentys 3 years...
Dark Dreamer75 at 3:50pm 6th April 2010 Ever try storing on a memory card? I have never found a problem with that, as far as just taking my gamer tag with me.
Andrew Beehler at 1:40pm 6th April 2010 I've been waiting fo this for quite a while. I've been getting tired of continually recovering my game tag at home and work, when I knew that it should be easy enough to port it around on the USB key that I keep on my key ring.