bestfixit January 27th 1955 (Age 54) Male Vadnais Heights Links Game Spot CBS Interactive is the premier online content network for information and entertainment. Our brands dive deep into the things people care most about across news, sports, entertainment, technology and business.
How To Add An External Hard Drive To A Playstation 3 Or Xbox 360
Add
More Storage to Your Gaming Console With an External Hard Drive
If you have a gaming console that came with a small hard drive or no hard drive
at all, then adding an external hard drive is a reasonably quick and simple
solution. Sure, you can replace the original hard drives that came in the
system with a larger one, but those laptop hard drives can get quite expensive,
especially in the larger capacities. An external hard drive will let you add
more storage at a much lower price while at the same time allowing you to
control the content yourself. On a system like an Xbox 360, you cannot add
content to the built in hard drive unless it is downloaded from Xbox Live or
ripped from a CD. With an external hard drive, you have full control of your
content, and can easily upload or download new content without much trouble.
Choosing Your External Hard Drive
Naturally, you will need a hard drive and an enclosure. Almost any USB external
hard drive will work for your purposes. The main difference is if you are
looking for portability vs. storage size. If you have some laptop hard drives
lying around, then buy a 2.5 laptop hard drive enclosure. The advantages of
using a smaller laptop hard drive are that it will be much smaller and much
more portable, and will most likely not require a power supply. However, laptop
hard drives usually pale in capacity compared to regular 3.5 hard drives of
the same price. A 3.5 external hard drive will store much more content but
will probably require an extra power port. If your gaming console is usually
located in one location and not likely to move around, a 3.5 external hard
drive might be the best solution. Check out
http://www.iomagic.com/Categories/results.asp?cat=77 to learn more about
external hard drive benefits.
Formatting Your Hard Drive
Gaming consoles need an external hard drive that is formatted in the FAT32 file
system. You can use virtually any hard drive currently sold on the market, as
FAT32 can support hard drives up to 2 Terabytes in size. However, the
limitation of FAT32 is that it cannot hold individual files larger then 4GB in
size. Also, Windows 2000 and XP cannot create or format partitions larger than
32GB. Windows 98 users can only create and partition hard drives up to 127GB in
size. So, in order to create a FAT32 partition and format it above the 32GB or
127GB limitations, you will need a utility like Partition Magic or some other
drive/partition utility. I highly recommend CompuApps Swissknife, which can be
downloaded for free at http://download.com for PC users. Mac OSX users can
simply open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app, choose the desired drive,
and click on the Erase. Choose 'MS-DOS (FAT) and then click on the 'Erase'
button. You should now have a hard drive formatted in FAT32.
Once your drive is done formatting in FAT32, its simply a matter of uploading
content to your new drive and connecting it to your gaming console. Simply
connect your USB cable to an available USB port on the front of your
Playstation 3, or the back of your Xbox 360. Your game console should recognize
your new device automatically, and allow you to browse your new files on the
external hard drive. Visit "External
Hard Drive"
