Do 3rd party hard drives work on xbox 360 S for backwards compat?

plufim

I've been looking for a hard drive for my 360S so I can play some of my old original xbox games*, and the price for the official drives is freaking insane. However, I've seen some much cheaper ones on ebay that are obviously from 3rd party manufacturers (like this one).

Has anyone used these 3rd party drives? Do they work, and is it something that microsoft are likely to try and block with an update? And specifically, do they work with backwards compatibility, or is that something coded onto the official ones only?

I just wanna play burnout 3, dammit.

*seriously, forcing people to buy a HDD just to get original games to work, even when the system has internal memory AND can use USB storage is just asinine and greedy. And fuck next gen for effectively killing BC.

Pantshandshake

As far as I can tell, only Microsoft hard drives allow backwards compatibility on the 360, so no third party allowed.

And an easy fix for the Xbox One not being BC is having a 360 around, which you do.

DevoutlyApathetic

If you can lay hands on one of the old greybox hard drives that sat on top it's possible to rip it open and take the proprietary drive out and put it in the new xbox s. It works just fine. Though admittedly I don't think I've used the BC since I did that.

a5ehren

Legally, only the official drives have the bootblock with the XBOX backwards compatibility due to the fact that MS has to pay Nvidia a royalty for it. I would wager that these 3rd party drives have that data on them via less-than-legal means, but there's no way to know without trying it.