"Adding some storage capacity to your Xbox 360 is really easy to do. The best part about using a USB hard drive with your 360 is that YOU have control of what content you have on it. With the factory Xbox hard drive you cannot load any content to it unless its acquired from Live or ripped form CD's. That does not do much for us that want our MP3 collection on our Xbox 360's now. I'm not up for re-ripping my CD's again, nor am I satisfied with streaming as the only means of accessing MY media. I do bring my Xbox all over the place and would LOVE to be abut to use MY content. Hear that Bill, J Allard or Major Nelson.. I bet I am not the only one ;). I don't think the horse is dead yet, is it? Well I will just keep saying it till its delivered via Live or the mod scene works it out.
Another bonus when accessing your music and photos from the "portable device" applet on the 360 is you actually have file view. I was first frustrated with the fact that if I actually could get all of my music onto the stock 360 drive it would be displayed to me in various predefined filters like: artist, song, genre and so on. The problem with that is I already have my music database highly organized; just how I like it. After the filters is all a big mess again. Fortunately when accessing data on the USB device it resorts to a more familiar file view with your existing folder structure as the organization." [more]