I have an old white 360 which is still serving me well, but the 60GB hard drive is getting rather cramped. So I picked up a cheap official 320GB drive, figuring that inside the case an Xbox hard drive is an Xbox hard drive ? if you can take an old-school drive out of the enclosure and plug it into a 360S, surely you can take a new drive, pull it out of the black plastic shell, and pop it into the old enclosure.
I didn't figure on the aforementioned plastic shell being sealed so tightly shut, though. Nothing short of a hacksaw seems likely to open the damned thing up, and I'm afraid of cutting through the drive itself by accident if I break out the big guns. Is there a trick to getting the bare drive out of that shell? Will an SATA extension cable work to plug the drive into the port in the enclosure? Is there any cable that would allow me to just plug the new drive directly into the 360's HD port?
First the 320GB drive needs to be flashed with M$'s firmware for their Xbox 360 Drives. You can't just simply connect a HDD and have it be readable.
You can put the drive in the slim without using the black shell enclosure that they have for the other drive. But if you need one, they sell them online pretty cheap.
But ya, the HDD needs to be flashed with a HDD Firmware so that the 360 can use it, and as for the old drive, you can connect it to a computer, and reformat it, and use it as mass storage if you want.
Like I said, it's an official drive. Microsoft branded, just plug into the 360 and play. The problem was plugging it into the non-slim 360. Anyway, the solution turned out to be easier than I thought: Don't even try taking the drive out of the case. If you open up an old enclosure, the SATA cord has just enough slack in it to plug into a drive sitting on top of the thing, case and all. Visual reference here.
