The Spring 2010 System Update for XBox 360s was released today. Most notably, it adds USB storage device support. USB flash drives can now be used like memory units or hard drives to store game content, arcade titles and more. There is a limit of 16 gigabytes that can be seen by the XBox, and there are partition options to make larger or smaller drives dual-useful for both gaming and PC storage. The XBox partitions are created with a proprietary format, but it would be pretty darn interesting if someone found a way to creatively examine the contents of Wing Commander Arena. -- Original update published on April 6, 2010
I would have thought the limit would have been higher...is there some technical reason it's limited to only 16? Still it's a great feature for MS to add....
It's a question in the FAQ I linked, and their answer is indirect, but it's also obvious. If they made it higher than 16, you could just use a USB hard drive and wouldn't need to buy the new XBox branded memory sticks or hard drive that just came out. This already makes their old memory units and some of their old hard drives fairly obsolete. As the FAQ says, this is a 32x improvement over the 512 meg memory card that I use and love today, so it's a great improvement overall.
I think the awesome thing is that I can put my GamerTag on the same USB stick I have on my keychain for work.
hmm, Would this allow me to say take a Mass Effect Save from the xbox and copy it over to my pc version of the game? So I don't have to restart the game on the pc?
I don't think so -- you can't read the Xbox partition on your PC (without some hacking) and the two games aren't necessarily compatible in the first place.
Yeah, LOAF's right. I think it's very cool that the XBox formatting doesn't just take over the flash drive - you still can have a PC partition, but they are separate and two different file formats.
I think you do get to use USB harddrives for this as well, it's just that you can't use more than 16GB of it. But you can use more than one key, so saving different stuff to different USB Keys is an option for people that want to extend their 360 space even further. For someone like me who still only has the 20GB drive this is a huge update. The other added benefit of this is that people don't need the specialized harddrive transfer kit when upgrading to the larger harddrives, though that would still be a chore if you are going from 120GB to 250.
Yeah, you can. From a Windows/XBox point of view, both are the same type of device. My point was that you can get a 250 GB usb drive for like $45 now, and if they allowed you to do that, it'd wipe out the market for the new $129 250 GB XBox drive.
