Can you believe the Xbox 360 came out about 20 years ago? In that time, everyone has gamed using hard-drives. Due to security restrictions imposed by Microsoft, it is not possible to insert just any drive and expect it to work. Western Digital hard-drives were found to be the easiest to modify for Xbox 360 compatibility, but even that became more difficult in 2020 when the firmware started becoming more locked down. If you want to make a custom drive now, you have to search for a compatible WD drive, which will grow more difficult as the months go by.

FATXplorer 3.0 beta 35 is here with a brand-new breakthrough solution: Xbox 360 SSD Maker!

Xbox 360 SSD Maker

Xbox 360 SSD Maker is a utility that flashes/updates SSD firmware information to make them Xbox 360 retail compatible. It achieves the same result as the Xbox 360 HDD Maker released last year. The benefits of SSD Maker is that it works on a lot more drives and you are not limited to a specific brand.

Drive Compatibility

It is so much better than HDD Maker! While previously you were limited to Western Digital HDDS manufactured before 2020, now you can purchase many different SSDs from various brands in new condition and expect them to work. However, that does not mean every SSD is compatible. Only SSDs with specific controllers are going to work. Controllers from Silicon Motion, Phison, Maxio, and Realtek are currently supported.

Licensing

If you have a FATXplorer license, you can use SSD Maker. However, some might think the current $25 license price is a bit steep for something you will only use once, so an SSD-specific license is now available for purchase at a $3 price to make it accessible to as many people as possible.

For all the details, check out this page:

Xbox 360 SSD Support Information

Other Updates

XDON

Many have provided feedback regarding failures in detecting XDON consoles. The discovery code has been improved and testing has shown it successfully discover consoles beta 34 would miss. If this still doesn’t work for you, the new XDON Direct Connect option can be used to connect manually by IP:

Ignore Security Sector

When loading a device, the Options menu has a new option to ignore the security sector. This helps when there is a mismatched security sector on the drive and results in your Content Partition being empty due to the incorrect size.

Restore Partition Table

Also newly available in the device loading Options menu is the option to restore Original Xbox partition tables. This mainly helps people who formatted using an “F-takes-all” approach and lost access to their files after some partition table wipe event. It also has the option to restore the partition table from a file for more advanced cases.

This has been a top support request ever since Original Xbox support was added and now most people will be able to fix the issue in 1 click!