The Xbox 360 faired very well next to the PS3 during the last generation of games console hardware
, but in one area it really came up short. Internal storage upgrades were limited to Microsoft’s official, and very expensive drives, and external storage support over USB was limited to just 32GB.
You’d think with the Xbox One now being Microsoft’s main focus and having been on the market for 17 months that would be the end of the matter. However, Major Nelson has confirmed that Xbox 360 owners will be getting support for external hard drives up to 2TB in size before the end of 2015.
When the next update for the Xbox 360 Preview Program gets released, support for larger external storage will be added through the system update. The other big change is the console no longer reserving hard drive space in advance. So if you have 10GB of games, the 360 will only use that 10GB of space after the update.
Anyone not in the Preview Program will have to wait until “later this year” to get it unlocked. One side effect of the reserved space removal is the potential need to clear your Xbox 360 storage to take advantage of all the space available on the drive. Microsoft needs to explain this better before the update goes live outside of the preview release.
While Xbox 360 owners will welcome the external storage update, it really has come a few years too late. Still, if you have a 360 with a very full hard drive, or a library of digital games you have to keep juggling, this will solve that problem if you’re willing to invest in a new external hard drive. You may just want to hold off a little longer and see if any compatibility issues appear from testing in the Preview Program.
