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As it says in the title: My older brother is considering getting a Xbox of his own (instead of borrowing mine all the time ), but he doesn't want to pay the extra 50 bucks for a lot of storage Space he probably won't need. So I was wondering if you could use regular USB drives to install games and save data? I think I've read something about it, but I'm not sure anymore.

Has anyone tried that yet?

You can definitely save your game progress onto a flash drive (as well as transfer music to the hard drive), but I don't think that you can install games to anything but the hard drive.

Good luck finding a flash drive big enough to install games to that won't end up costing nearly as much as an X-Box hard drive, anyway (installations are generally 7 gigabytes).

Not sure about installing games, but save game data shouldn't be a problem. A reminder: when selecting a non-360 USB stick or drive, ensure that it is clean of all regular data. The 360 will format it the first time round and put its own crap on so it can be recognized as a memory unit.

Yes you can store game saves on a USB drive.

Me and my bro split my 8Gb USB so he could transfer all his saves onto his new xbox harddrive(his drive screwed up and his xbox RRODed lol).

The best thing is though that you can allocate how much space you want to use providing you go over the minimum amount, which is 1Gb i think.

If you ever need to resort back to the full amount of the USB then just delete the hidden Xbox360 folder(make sure to back up your games 1st tho )

What about Arcade Games and DLC? Can they be saved on a flash drive?

Thing is those contain "hidden" licenses that must be associated with a specific console. You might be able to store them on a Flash Drive but you can't play them anywhere but on the Xbox you Downloaded them too.
If you're very concerned about storage space for those things don't foget you can delete DLC you are not using and redownload it again for free as long as its the same console.

I would like to say the the hard drive would be the better option just because I felt the same and went with the arcade just to find out I needed the hard drive for games off the market place and the likes. Using a flash drive is good and all for saves but after awhile games like fall out 3 or newvegas will fill up the flash drive quick.

They do make USB hard drives, would work for anything a flash drive would. Alternatively its possible to get an internal drive and overwrite it with the xbox firmware (takes a bit of know how). Either of which would be far far cheaper than paying Microsoft for one.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:Thing is those contain "hidden" licenses that must be associated with a specific console. You might be able to store them on a Flash Drive but you can't play them anywhere but on the Xbox you Downloaded them too.
If you're very concerned about storage space for those things don't foget you can delete DLC you are not using and redownload it again for free as long as its the same console.

Yeah, its really funny on that stuff. I wanted to leave my profile on my old 360 going into the bedroom as I got one of the new black ones for the living room. Mainly so my boys didn't have to play Lego Stars Wars from scratch again etc, but no dice. It woun't let you keep anything on the older machine when you transfer, and you can't copy the profile onto the stick to put it on another machine.

It locks the files down. Something to do with the gamerscore apparently as well as the liscences for the games, I understand the reasoning, but its blinking annoying when you just want to do something innocent like I wanted to do above.

At least the boys didn't mind starting over.

Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:Thing is those contain "hidden" licenses that must be associated with a specific console. You might be able to store them on a Flash Drive but you can't play them anywhere but on the Xbox you Downloaded them too.
If you're very concerned about storage space for those things don't foget you can delete DLC you are not using and redownload it again for free as long as its the same console.

Yeah, its really funny on that stuff. I wanted to leave my profile on my old 360 going into the bedroom as I got one of the new black ones for the living room. Mainly so my boys didn't have to play Lego Stars Wars from scratch again etc, but no dice. It woun't let you keep anything on the older machine when you transfer, and you can't copy the profile onto the stick to put it on another machine.

It locks the files down. Something to do with the gamerscore apparently as well as the liscences for the games, I understand the reasoning, but its blinking annoying when you just want to do something innocent like I wanted to do above.

At least the boys didn't mind starting over.

There's something called a "Data Transfer Kit" if you premanently want to move everything to a new HD. You can put your profile on a stick and take it around, I do it all the time.