Microsoft released the much-talked about Xbox 360 firmware update today allowing players to use USB storage media for gamertags, XBLA titles, game installs and more.
It’s surprisingly effortless to format a USB device for the Xbox 360, once you know how to do so anyway. After inserting a USB device, I simply navigated to the system settings area and selected “Memory”. From there, your USB drive should appear as an unformatted memory unit. After selecting it, you’re given the option to format it for the 360 or configure it, which allows you to adjust the amount of space the 360 will reserve on the drive.
And that’s pretty much it, actually. It’s a painless process. Just make sure that you choose “Configure” if there’s stuff on the USB drive you want to save.
When you put in an Xbox 360 formatted drive into your PC with hidden folders set to visible, you can actually see the folder created by the 360 to store your saves. Since your PC just sees the files created by the 360 as unreadable archives, you can’t explore those file folders (yet, though we’re sure enterprising hackers will address that at some point), but you can copy them, meaning you can, in a manner of speaking, back up your saves.
