Recently, I saw a review online for the Seagate 8TB Game Drive Hub for Xbox, and thought that it would be a good candidate for an external drive for my original Xbox One. I am still waiting for Microsoft to release an Xbox One X with a bigger hard drive.
With the Seagate drive, I figured I could still download all the games I own or plan to buy, and then use the drive when I bought my aforementioned Xbox One X. I figured it would be good for me and my ISP to not have to download multiple terabytes of games.
The WD Gaming Drive Accelerated is compatible with the Xbox One S and Xbox One X alike. The 1TB model is purportedly able to accommodate up to 25 games, based on the average download size of an. Shop for 500gb xbox one external hard drive at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up. Check here:- Are you looking for the Best External Hard Drives for Xbox One We spent time to fi. Seagate Game Drive For Xbox 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – USB 3.0 Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Special Edition, Designed For Xbox One, 1 Year Rescue Service (Stea2000426) 4.7.
Another great bonus to having an external drive connected to your Xbox One is backup and recovery. Since none of my games are installed on my console, if I experience any issues due to an Xbox Insider update, if I need to factory reset my console, restoring games is a much easier affair.
While I see Seagate's reasoning for making their 8TB Game Drive Hub for Xbox white to match the color of the Xbox One S, I prefer basic black. Also, there's a chance that I might use the drive as a portable external drive for my other Windows 10 PC devices. So, instead of the Seagate 8TB Game Drive Hub for Xbox, I purchased the unbranded Seagate 8TB Backup Plus Hub.
The Seagate 8TB Backup Plus Hub mimics the specs for the Seagate 8TB Game Drive Hub for Xbox:
- Dual front-facing USB 3.0 ports
- Plug and Play
- Up to 160MB/s
- High-speed USB 3.0 performance
- Connect and charge your accessories and mobile devices
On Amazon, Seagate 8TB Backup Plus Hub is available about $200 at the same price as the Xbox-branded version. Just a few weeks ago, I purchased the Backup Plus Hub for $180 and the Xbox-branded version was about $230. Boxpn client download. It's possible Amazon figured out that these devices have identical specs.
I have been agonizing over the last few weeks on whether or not to get the new Xbox One X. Best stock sounds in logic pro x. I have the original Xbox One with a 500GB HD, and well over 2TB worth of games. The games I own include current Xbox One games and all the Xbox 360 and original Xbox games available via Backward Compatibility. However, I wasn't able to keep them all due to the obvious lack of hard drive space I have on my original Xbox One.
My problem is what happens if you are coming from the special edition Gears of War 4 Xbox One S? That console has 2TB, so how does Microsoft expect you to switch to the 1 TB Xbox One X? Not all of your games will be able to transfer from Xbox One S to Xbox One X. While I expect Microsoft will release an Xbox One X with a bigger HD soon, hopefully by early 2018, 1TB just doesn't cut it for the amount of Xbox games I own or plan to buy.
Best external ssd 2019. When the Xbox One X was launched, I was confused at the low amount of hard drive space available on the console. 1TB is not a lot of space when you figure out how much hard drive space the Xbox One X Enhanced content downloads add to Xbox One games. Recently, I stopped buying physical Xbox One games and started buying digital games instead.
In order to save space on my console, I scroll through my Xbox One game library to see what games I no longer play and delete them to make room for newer Xbox One titles. With the Seagate Backup Hub Plus, I don't have that problem. Right now, I have 106 Xbox games installed on the drive, including original Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One games. Currently, I am using 1.6TB of the 8TB drive with 5.6TB in free space (only 7.2TB is usable space on the drive).
Quantum Break is one such instance. The game itself is only 8 GB, but the Xbox One X Enhanced content adds another 94 GB of content to the game. While that wouldn't make or break the Xbox One X hard drive, add other titles like Gears of War 4 and Halo 5 Guardians, and you will top off your Xbox One X storage really quick.
The Seagate 8TB Backup Plus Hub can work with any of your Windows 10 or Xbox One devices and connects via a proprietary USB connection. One downside is it requires its own power source, so it's another device that you'll need to keep plugged in. I don't know how well it would work with the Xbox One X, but it loads games on my original Xbox One fine, sometimes it may take a second or two to start some Xbox One games.
As Microsoft did with the Xbox One S, it is only a matter of time until we'll see an Xbox One X with a bigger hard drive. Until then, I will keep using the Seagate 8TB Backup Plus Hub.
Buy the Seagate 8TB Backup Plus Hub on Amazon.
Share This Post:
A couple of years ago I wrote an article about using an SSD with the Xbox One. The short version is that there was a marked increase in performance when using an external USB 3 SSD over in the internal spinning HDD with some games seeing 55-60% reductions in loading times. I received my Xbox One X yesterday and wanted to revisit these benchmarks again for two reasons. Firstly, the internal drive has 50% more throughput than the original Xbox One along with an increase in CPU and RAM that should mean faster texture unpacking and the ability to cache more data thus making everything load faster. Secondly, I wanted to see if the SSD performance would improve thanks to the CPU and RAM improvements. Digital Foundry looked into this briefly in their backwards compatibility review and found impressive gains between the HDD of the Xbox One and Xbox One X but they didn't investigate any gains for external drives.0010
Multiple patches have been released for the games I tested last time and I also upgraded to an Xbox One S so I decided to completely redo all of my testing rather than just take Xbox One X times for the previous games and compare them with my original Xbox One scores. I chose 4 different games and tested load times at several points for each. Every game was retested 3 times (with the average taken) on Xbox One S HDD, Xbox One S with external SSD, Xbox One X HDD, and Xbox One X with external SSD. The same SSD was used for both consoles and all save files were reloaded from the same point. They were also all running the latest patches with some optimised for 4K and others that weren't; I even tested an Xbox 360 game just to see how it fared.
Titanfall 2
This game is optimised for 4K and HDR (although the patch doesn't seem great) and I tested at two key points; how long it took to get to the main menu from a cold startup and then how long it took to resume a saved game in the single player campaign (the excellent 'Effect and Cause' mission to be precise).
Cold start to menu
- Xbox One S Internal HDD - 45s
- Xbox One X Internal HDD - 41s
- Xbox One S External SSD - 36s
- Xbox One X External SSD - 28s
Continue saved game
- Xbox One S Internal HDD - 53s
- Xbox One X Internal HDD - 45s
- Xbox One S External SSD - 43s
- Xbox One X External SSD - 33s
Xbox Hard Drive Best Buy
The Xbox One X HDD is roughly 19% faster than the Xbox One S but it is still slower than the SSD with the old console as I expected. However, I wasn't expecting the dramatic reduction in SSD load times between the S and X with a substantial 28-33% decrease. This is particularly surprising as I expected load times to be roughly comparable given that the CPU and RAM are increased but it should be loading higher resolution textures.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War
Another game optimised for 4K and HDR, this one was tested from a cold start up to the point at which the developer logos start to appear (as these are a fixed 19 seconds before you get to the main menu) and then resuming a saved game into the middle of the open world of the first city.
Cold start to logos
- Xbox One S Internal HDD - 32s
- Xbox One X Internal HDD - 32s
- Xbox One S External SSD - 19s
- Xbox One X External SSD - 16s
Continue saved game
Upgrade Xbox One Hard Drive
- Xbox One S Internal HDD - 58s
- Xbox One X Internal HDD - 56s
- Xbox One S External SSD - 28s
- Xbox One X External SSD - 25s
Far less impressive reductions on this front with both the HDD comparison and SSD comparison only being 2-3s quicker on the Xbox One X. This is still a 5-10% improvement but nothing massively noticeable. Of course, this does highlight how much an SSD improves these large scale games with massive worlds and a ton of textures; loading times for continuing a saved game are more than half that of the HDD.
Red Dead Redemption
This is a bit of a curveball I put in just to see if there was any difference for Xbox 360 backwards compatible games. I tested the amount of time to get to the main menu and the amount of time to resume a game in the town of Chuparosa.
Cold start to menu
- Xbox One S Internal HDD - 43s
- Xbox One X Internal HDD - 42s
- Xbox One S External SSD - 37s
- Xbox One X External SSD - 37s
Continue saved game
- Xbox One S Internal HDD - 33s
- Xbox One X Internal HDD - 33s
- Xbox One S External SSD - 32s
- Xbox One X External SSD - 29s
Very little difference in this case with the HDD being pretty much identical between the S and the X. The SSD is slightly faster than the HDD for getting to the main menu (shaving off 5 precious seconds) but resuming a game is pretty much identical across both HDD and SSD with the exception of the Xbox One X SSD which shaves off around 9%. Still, you aren't going to see giant gains here either from upgrading to Xbox One X or from switching from the HDD to an SSD on either model.
Forza Horizon 3
I chose this as my final game as it is unpatched and therefore doesn't have a 4K resolution bump or any improved textures. It does have HDR support but this affects the Xbox One S as well so this should be a good test of seeing what gains can be made to games that aren't haven't yet been updated for Xbox One X (although I believe Forza Horizon 3 is getting a patch at some point). I tested a cold start to the main menu and then resuming a game into the Hot Wheels DLC.
Cold start to menu
- Xbox One S Internal HDD - 39s
- Xbox One X Internal HDD - 39s*
- Xbox One S External SSD - 32s
- Xbox One X External SSD - 32s
Xbox One S Hard Drive
Continue saved game
- Xbox One S Internal HDD - 52s
- Xbox One X Internal HDD - 85s*
- Xbox One S External SSD - 32s
- Xbox One X External SSD - 20s
There are a number of interesting things about this result. Firstly, the SSD is already much faster over the HDD by around 39% but the SSD with the Xbox One X gets a substantial boost with a 37% reduction over the already improved Xbox One S SSD when continuing a game. The real story is in the Xbox One X HDD though which is substantially slower than the Xbox One S. In the first test, I eventually got it to load at the same speed as the Xbox One S but there were a few 45s outliers. The saved game continuation though is 65% slower on Xbox One X which I just can't fathom. I retested several times but always ended up in the same ballpark of 85s over the consistent 52s on the Xbox One S. It will be interesting to see if this changes when an Xbox One X patch comes out for this game or whether the increased textures will push that load time even further.
In conclusion, using an external SSD is still the fastest way to load your games on Xbox One and the increased CPU and RAM of the Xbox One X means that load times are even faster both for optimised and unoptimised games (sometimes up to a 37% reduction in load times over the Xbox One S with SSD which I did not expect at all). Meanwhile, the internal HDD is slightly harder to gauge; whilst it seems to be slightly faster for most things (though not as fast as an SSD even with the old hardware) there is that odd outlier of Forza Horizon 3 where it is substantially slower.
