Tired of opening my 360

Since opening the Xbox 360 is not the easiest thing to do I deceided to a little modification to my console today. My main goal was to be able to use the 360 normally and add the feature to connect it to my PC without opening the case. I did all of this in three easy steps:

Step 1: Looking for the right tool
One big advantage of having a lot of stuff flying around is the fact that you sometimes find something usable :) I was going through the stuff Asus was kind enough to provide me with when I bought the A8N32-SLI motherboard a few months ago. One of the unused items I found was a bracket intended for installing two external sata-devices. Just what I needed! On the "inside" of the adapter I inserted two SATA-cables, one to go to the SATA-connector on the motherboard of the 360 and one to go to the DVD-drive in the 360. Finally I used the tiny original SATA-cable from the 360 to connect the two connectors together on the front-side of the adapter (and thus building a "pass-through". A picture is word a thousand words (sorry English in not my native language):




Step 2: Opening up the 360 for the last(?) time
To be able to remove the existing tiny SATA-cable from the Xbox 360 and to connect the two new ones leading to the SATA-bracket I had to open my box once again. I first removed the tiny SATA-cable which connects the Xbox drive to the motherboard. After that I could easily plug in one of the longer (red) SATA-Cables in the motherboard and the other one into the DVD-drive. The last thing for me to do was to re-use the tiny cable from the 360 to create a loop-through (as shown in the picture above).

It's allways a good idea to see if things work you expected before closing the case again. So that's what I did: Plugged in the cables and fed a game to the 360-drive. It all worked like expected. On to closing the case!

Step 3: Closing it all up again
Since I had to bring two new SATA cable to the outside of the 360 closing the box wasn't as easy as just putting all the pieces together again. I deceided to let the two new cables stick out of the box on the HDD-side. To do so I only had to fold back a small piece of the inside metal-casing to let the cables out. Once done it was as simple as putting the box back together. It took me a few tries on the outside to connect the HDD once again. The finished result:


Two red SATA-cables brought to the outside

My intended goals for this modification
I did this modification to be a able to do the following things to my 360 and/or 360 drive without the need to open the 360 case:

• Hook up the 360 DVD-drive to my PC;
• Hook up another DVD-drive to my 360;
• Disable the 360 DVD-drive completely.