Connecting an external hard drive to an Xbox 360 using a Mac

Premise:

I own an Xbox 360 that I use as my primary entertainment centre. I use it to play games, watch Netflix, and watch movies streamed from an external hard-drive from my MacBook.  That's right! You read it correctly... streamed from an external hard-drive through my MacBook! Gross!

In the beginning, streaming movies from my MacBook was a fairly easy solution.  Especially considering I was using a great piece of software called Rivet.  What I really wanted to do was connect the external hard-drive directly to my Xbox 360.

How I did it:

First thing I needed to know was how to format the drive so that the Xbox can read it.  It turns out that the Xbox 360 supports reading drives that have the HFS+ file system format... much better than the antiquated FAT32 file system!!

I used my MacBook Pro running OS X (10.6) to format a Maxtor 320GB external USB hard-drive using "Disk Utility" found in the "/Applications/Utilities/" folder.

Formatting the drive:

1. Run Disk Utility
2. Select the drive you want to use
3. Select the "Partition" tab for the drive
4. Select "1 Partition" under "Volume Scheme"
5. Give the drive a meaningful name like "Media"
6. Select "Mac OS Extended" from the "Format" choices
7. Click the "Options" button and select "Apple Partition Map"
8. Click "Apply"

 

Now copy some media to your newly formatted drive to test on your Xbox 360.  As long as the media type is supported, your Xbox 360 should be able to see any videos, music, and photos on the drive.

Windows users can use a program called MacDrive to format an external drive as HFS+ but I won't go into details because I only use Windows if I'm forced to by gunpoint. ;)

Enjoy!