external hard drive.

[jamie128]

Hey guys, i want to get an external hard drive for cheapish to store my movies/tv series and be able to connect it to my xbox 360 or tv.

Do i need specific ones or will any external hard drive be simply plug and play?

[matthias73]

Been downloading too much porn eh?

[jamie128]

matthias73 said:

Been downloading too much porn eh?

lol

[deltashad]

Dont know about the Xbox but the PS3 has to be a powered Hard drive or a stick USB.

[jamie128]

deltashad said:

Dont know about the Xbox but the PS3 has to be a powered Hard drive or a stick USB.

ive seen a few usb portable hard drives which i dont think are powered but are 500gb, i wonder if they will work

[Goa'uld]

Unless something drastic has been changed in the recent xbox live updates, the xbox can only support/view harddrives which are FAT32 formatted, not NTFS drives.

I made this mistake years back getting a WD external drive which was NTFS, I formatted the drive back to FAT32 however some people may not want to mess around with this etc.

ETA - No need for an external power supply, the xbox can access external USB drives no problem. For reference I was using the following which came NTFS and I formatted to FAT32;

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/western-digital-my-p...

but the pricing of most data storage is still a bit pants due to the flooding in Thailand.

Edited by Goa'uld on Tuesday 28th February 15:55

[nick s]

this is a brilliant bit of kit

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Live-Media...

i have one, and it plugs into any TV. You just plug your hard drive into this little box and then you have full folders full of films etc from your hard drive available on your tv. Awesome bit of kit! I wouldn't be without it!

this way you can take it round a mates house etc, or put it on any tv without having to drag the xbox around everywhere.

[jamie128]

nick s said:

this is a brilliant bit of kit

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Live-Media...

i have one, and it plugs into any TV. You just plug your hard drive into this little box and then you have full folders full of films etc from your hard drive available on your tv. Awesome bit of kit! I wouldn't be without it!

this way you can take it round a mates house etc, or put it on any tv without having to drag the xbox around everywhere.

this is one reason i am buying a hard drive because at the momenet i hate having to turn my laptop on so i can watch stuff on my xbox. Does this bit of kit do anything fancy like encode whilst watching because xbox can only play so many types of files.

[Goa'uld]

nick s said:

this is a brilliant bit of kit

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Live-Media...

i have one, and it plugs into any TV. You just plug your hard drive into this little box and then you have full folders full of films etc from your hard drive available on your tv. Awesome bit of kit! I wouldn't be without it!

this way you can take it round a mates house etc, or put it on any tv without having to drag the xbox around everywhere.

Yeah, depends what your collection of movies/tv shows/pr0n consists of - the xbox can't play MKV files natively which make up alot of my shows like Dexter and The Walking Dead. It plays AVI.

Something to think about how you see your use/downloads changing in the future.

Before you know it we'll be steering you round to a full fledged home theatre pc haha

[jamie128]

Goa'uld said:

Yeah, depends what your collection of movies/tv shows/pr0n consists of - the xbox can't play MKV files natively which make up alot of my shows like Dexter and The Walking Dead. It plays AVI.

Something to think about how you see your use/downloads changing in the future.

Before you know it we'll be steering you round to a full fledged home theatre pc haha

the xbox was playing my mkv files. Mind you im not sure if that was when i had tvversity and it encoded during streaming but im sure it still does play mkv

[Goa'uld]

Yeah I used to transcode on the fly when using the xbox but it never played the MKV straight on the machine. Its been a very long time since I used it for that though as the fan is so bloomin loud - gets annoying after a while!

[F i F]

synology stuff is worth a look.

[jamie128]

Goa'uld said:

Yeah I used to transcode on the fly when using the xbox but it never played the MKV straight on the machine. Its been a very long time since I used it for that though as the fan is so bloomin loud - gets annoying after a while!

what is that box, is it a hard drive or just an encoder im confused