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Xbox One External Hard Drive Recommendations

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Feb 21, 2013
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Xbox One External Hard Drive Recommendations

I'm considering using an external drive for my Xbox one - primarily so that I can use that to install resource-heavy games like Fallout 4 and hopefully get a bit of a boost in loading times.

Does anyone have recommendations on a good, cheap external drive that would provide noticeable benefits?
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I heard The seagate external drives with samsung innards have 500gb a platter data density with respectable seek times at 5400 RPM. They're also fairly cheap. I use one in my PS4. I've also tried a Hitachi 7200 RPM drive in my xbox one and it worked well too.
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I've got a 2gb WD MyPassport attached to mine and it's been great. Best investment I made on Black Friday last year.
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Ren wrote: I heard The seagate external drives with samsung innards have 500gb a platter data density with respectable seek times at 5400 RPM. They're also fairly cheap. I use one in my PS4. I've also tried a Hitachi 7200 RPM drive in my xbox one and it worked well too.
Thanks, I'll look into those. I also read that a SSD as an external for Xbone isn't really beneficial because it's bottlenecked by the transfer speed or something? That true?

The Canterbury Tail wrote: I've got a 2gb WD MyPassport attached to mine and it's been great. Best investment I made on Black Friday last year.
2GB or 2TB? I thought they had to be minimum 250 GB for it to work as an external drive on Xbone?
*Edit: I figure you meant TB... 2GB won't really do much for the games anyway with the install sizes
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M1GOmigs wrote: 2GB or 2TB? I thought they had to be minimum 250 GB for it to work as an external drive on Xbone?
*Edit: I figure you meant TB... 2GB won't really do much for the games anyway with the install sizes
Doh!! Yes 2TB.
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M1GOmigs wrote: Thanks, I'll look into those. I also read that a SSD as an external for Xbone isn't really beneficial because it's bottlenecked by the transfer speed or something? That true?




2GB or 2TB? I thought they had to be minimum 250 GB for it to work as an external drive on Xbone?
*Edit: I figure you meant TB... 2GB won't really do much for the games anyway with the install sizes
As far as I know the USB 3 interface on the xbox one is actually theoretically faster than the sata 2 interface of the internal drive even with the sata->usb overhead, but both are more than fast enough for a mechanical drive and many SSD's. However, the main bottleneck of an SSD with the Xbox One is the Xbox One itself. Just like PC's when the SSD is fast enough the bottleneck becomes the CPU and to a lesser degree it's subsystems. That is one of a few reasons why both the ps4 and xbone, with their relatively weak CPU's, don't benefit that greatly with an SSD compared to a PC.

On a sidebar, as the UI runs on the internal drive and IOPS is much more important than maximum bandwidth for user experience I find the USB 3 is better than sata 2 a little erroneous.
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Ren wrote: As far as I know the USB 3 interface on the xbox one is actually theoretically faster than the sata 2 interface of the internal drive even with the sata->usb overhead, but both are more than fast enough for a mechanical drive and many SSD's. However, the main bottleneck of an SSD with the Xbox One is the Xbox One itself. Just like PC's when the SSD is fast enough the bottleneck becomes the CPU and to a lesser degree it's subsystems. That is one of a few reasons why both the ps4 and xbone, with their relatively weak CPU's, don't benefit that greatly with an SSD compared to a PC.

On a sidebar, as the UI runs on the internal drive and IOPS is much more important than maximum bandwidth for user experience I find the USB 3 is better than sata 2 a little erroneous.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I have been so out of the PC hardware game for like a decade, so difference in speed of USB 3 vs SATA II was all Greek to me :p

So question: With USB 3 being faster, I should see a difference in loading times even with a 5400 external drive, all things equal, right? Anyone have experience running Fallout4 (or other large RPG type games) from External drives? Is it noticeably different?

I've seen the benchmarks by I think Eurogamer, but I want to make sure it's actually worth it since I'm not really doing this to upgrade storage.
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M1GOmigs wrote: Ah, thanks for clarifying. I have been so out of the PC hardware game for like a decade, so difference in speed of USB 3 vs SATA II was all Greek to me :p

So question: With USB 3 being faster, I should see a difference in loading times even with a 5400 external drive, all things equal, right? Anyone have experience running Fallout4 (or other large RPG type games) from External drives? Is it noticeably different?

I've seen the benchmarks by I think Eurogamer, but I want to make sure it's actually worth it since I'm not really doing this to upgrade storage.
If you get a quality external HDD load times will be faster not because of USB3, but because the hard drive is actually faster. The 500 gig drives in most XBox one's are budget drives with bad seek times, and below average sequential transfer rates. Mine personally had a really outdated Western Digital Caviar Blue 5400 RPM drive. If you really want faster loading times from an external and don't want to spend on a SSD, get the largest 7200 RPM drive you can find with great platter density and seek times. http://www.storagereview.com/ has a great list of overall drive performance for almost all modern drives. If size and noise wasn't an issue you could even use a desktop drive.
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Another question for those that have done it: Does the XBox One allow you to format a partition size for its drive, or does it pretty much just use the whole drive, leaving it useless for other means?
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M1GOmigs wrote: Another question for those that have done it: Does the XBox One allow you to format a partition size for its drive, or does it pretty much just use the whole drive, leaving it useless for other means?
It uses the whole thing.
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Ren's the man, lol. He explained that very well.
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CFRTim wrote: Ren's the man, lol. He explained that very well.
You console peasants are welcome.... Just kidding :)
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Does an External drive for the Xbox one have to be an AC powered drive or can you just plug in a USB drive. I'm thinking of one of the slim 2TB drives that are on sale.
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Mike71 wrote: Does an External drive for the Xbox one have to be an AC powered drive or can you just plug in a USB drive. I'm thinking of one of the slim 2TB drives that are on sale.
I have used a newer USB 3 drive powered strictly from the USB hook up with my Xbox One.
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Personally I'll be getting a 256GB SSD, probably a Samsung EVO. I don't need a lot of storage and prefer to have the faster load times. The load time comparisons I've seen seem worth the extras cost, to me anyway.
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chenwaa123 wrote: Personally I'll be getting a 256GB SSD, probably a Samsung EVO. I don't need a lot of storage and prefer to have the faster load times. The load time comparisons I've seen seem worth the extras cost, to me anyway.
Any deals you can share for decently priced 256GB SSD?
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That 500GB gets chewed up a lot faster than you think.
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I have a cheap USB powered only one I got off BestBuy a month or two ago for $59 ... seems to work flawlessly. Can't remember the model # but it was the one everyone on here was snatching up.

No complaints, no performance issues.
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Mike71 wrote: Does an External drive for the Xbox one have to be an AC powered drive or can you just plug in a USB drive. I'm thinking of one of the slim 2TB drives that are on sale.
It can be the portable ones that are powered off the USB (2.5" HDD inside those) but usually a powered external HDD will transfer data even faster over the USB 3.0, especially a good one
raspeed wrote: That 500GB gets chewed up a lot faster than you think.
So true. IMO, I don't think a 250GB SSD is a good investment on a console (I think REN covered that pretty well on the previous page), unless you only play 2 or 3 games, or your willing to move files around a lot from another HDD. Of course, you can also always erase/re-download, I'm on unlimited internet so that would be an option, just that those MS server are slammed at times, and this could be a slow process. Ideally, if you're gonna keep the Xbone for a while, and plan on playing a bunch of games, invest on a good 2TB or larger external HDD, a powered one if you wanna improve your loading times even more.

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