How to use a USB Flash Drive on the Xbox 360

Overview

You can use a USB flash drive up to 32GB. You can purchase official Xbox 360 pre-formatted 8GB or 16GB (32GB not available) flash drives from Sandisk or use another brand and format it on your own. This is a great option to backup your game important data and a good alternative versus the proprietary Xbox 360 Memory Unit. You can only plug two USB flash drives into the console at a time.

You won't be able to view or access the saved console data on a computer as they'll just appear as chunks of data with fixed file names. You can still browse the data but you can't do anything about them.

Note: You won't be able to use the full capacity since a small part of the storage will be reserved for system use.


Image source


Image source:

Content

You can store the following data in the formatted USB flash drive:

• Xbox game data (saves and installation files)


• Themes, icons, avatar items, DLCs, demos, trailers


• Arcade titles


• Facebook and Twitter pages


• Xbox 360 full games


• Xbox 360 Games on Demand


• Movies

The following content can't be installed or transferred in the USB flash drive:

• Music files like MP3 and WMA


• Original Xbox games

Minimum Requirements

• Your console's firmware should be updated. Older firmwares won't be able to support USB flash drives.


• Your USB flash drive should have the capacity of at least 1GB. For better performance, it is recommended to dedicate this flash drive only for the console.


• You should format the USB flash drive to a Windows FAT32 file system

Configuring the USB Flash Drive

1. Plug the USB flash drive in a free USB port in front of your console


2. Press the Guide button, then go to Settings then System Settings.






3. Select Storage or Memory then choose the USB Storage Device.





Image source

4. Select Configure Now or Customize

Image source

Configure Now: Wipes out all the data in the USB flash drive and configures it for Xbox 360 use.

Note: If the USB flash drive doesn't have at least 1GB free space available, you won't be able to proceed further.

Customize: Configures a portion of a USB flash drive for Xbox use (up to 32GB)

1. Move the slider to select the amount of storage space you want to allocate for Xbox use.




Image source

2. Select Configure


3. Wait for the test to finish. If it successfully completes, your flash drive is ready for use.




Image source

Reference