Xbox 360 System Update Adds Support for 2 TB Hard Drives, More

It warms my heart to watch Microsoft stop ignoring Xbox 360, and today’s release of a major new system update for the 360 is both welcome and overdue. Among other things, it provides the ability to add larger external hard drives so you can increase the amount of storage available to the console.

The new system update was previously tested by Xbox 360 preview program members, a representative of the Xbox team notes in a new blog post. This update adds the following new features.

Support for larger external USB hard drives. Now you can add an external USB-based hard drive with up to 2 TB of storage. This storage can be used for game downloads, saved games, and other data.

View your purchase history. You can now view your Xbox purchase history in Settings. To do so, navigate to Settings, Accounts, Purchase History.

Reset your password. You can now reset your password on the console. To do so, select “Forgot your password?” when you sign-in.

View networking statistics. You can now view the download speed, upload speed, and signal strength of the network to which your 360 is connected. To do so, navigate to Settings, System, Network Settings. Then, select the network and then Network Statistics.

View the balance in your Microsoft account. You can now see how much money have in your Microsoft account in the top-right corner of the screen when viewing the Dashboard. If you don’t wish to see this, you can turn off the display. Navigate to Settings, Profile, Account Security to turn it off.

My Xbox 360’s hard drive is basically full, and when I snag each month’s Games for Gold free games, I have to deal with a “hard drive full” error on the console. So I may look into adding an external drive and see if I can clear that up.