BestExternal Hard Drives for Xbox OneWindows Central2019
The WD 4TB My Book is a worthwhile purchase for anyone looking to install a large number of games on their Xbox One, taking full advantage of a whopping 4TB of storage.
Our pick
WD 4TB My Book
Boasting a large amount of storage for the price
Western Digital makes some great mechanical drives and this 4TB My Book is a great external storage solution for your Xbox console.
Who should buy this external hard drive
If you find yourself filling up the internal drive of the Xbox One and need to keep clearing games you don't play too often, adding an external storage device like this 4TB unit from Western Digital will allow you to store many more. It's also reasonably priced, so you don't need to break the bank.
Is it a good time to buy this drive?
Yes. Really, any time is a good time to purchase an external drive (or storage in general). The prices of many new drives are reasonable right now. It's also possible to score some excellent deals on mechanical drive-touting enclosures like this WD unit.
Reasons to buy
- 4TB of space
- Plug and play
- Store countless more games
Reasons not to buy
- Not as fast as an SSD
- Need a spare outlet for power
Expand your Xbox One capacity
Not only are you investing in a quality storage brand in Western Digital, but the prices of the company's My Book line of external enclosures are incredibly competitive. Some purchasers have even found the drives contained within the products to be priced more as standalone units than when inside the My Book protective casing, so you know you're getting a solid deal for the Xbox One S or Xbox One X.
With games becoming more complex and sizes hitting insane amounts for downloads, it makes sense to pick up an external drive to offset some of the burdens, since the Xbox One S only comes with either 500GB, 1TB or 2TB of internal space, which simply isn't enough anymore. The Xbox One X suffers from similar storage constraints. Throw in a 4TB Western Digital My Book and you have up to 6TB of storage space.
WD has you covered with 4TB of space, ample enough for many games.
The My Book is essentially a WD drive plugged into a daughter circuit board, which then runs via USB to the Xbox One S. That's pretty much it, aside from the protective plastic casing, of course. No thrills, no cool LED lighting, but when all you require the drive to do is spin up with the Xbox and store games, that's pretty much all you could ever need in an external drive.
WD offers the My Book series in 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 12TB and 16TB configurations. The latter two options are dual-drives, sporting larger cases with two drives inside. It all depends on how much you want to spend and how much capacity is required.
Alternatives to the WD My Book
The My Book isn't for everyone. If you demand the best speeds for load times, you'll want an SSD. Or perhaps you only require a drive, since you already have an enclosure. We rounded up some additional options to suit these needs.
Runner-up
Seagate Game Drive Hub 8TB
You'll likely never run out of space.
When you need serious capacity and are a serious Xbox One gamer, this is the drive for you. Massive storage on a single drive.
With a massive capacity of 8TB, this Seagate Game Drive is ideal for those who need to store a colossal library of Xbox One titles on their consoles but only wish to make use of a single drive. It's also designed to fit right in with the Xbox console itself.
Value pick
WD 1TB My Passport
More affordable than others
Want a portable drive you can take with you to various LAN events and Xbox parties? My Passport family of drives is worth a look.
Not only is the My Password from WD great value for 1TB, it's also perfect for taking along for the ride to LAN events and parties where your Xbox may also have an invite. While it's not designed alongside the Xbox, there are numerous colors to choose from to match your taste.
Portable SSD
Samsung 500GB T5
Don't spend too much money
Sporting read and write speeds of up to 540 MB/s, the Samsung T3 external SSD package is a great solution to improve performance and expand capacity.
What makes an SSD a worthwhile purchase for an Xbox One console are the read and write speeds, making it an ideal upgrade over the mechanical drives located inside the console. Samsung makes some of the best SSDs on the market so your collection of games is in good hands.
Speedy pick
Samsung 1TB 860 Pro
Expensive, reliable and super quick
Wanting increased read and write speeds of SSDs over traditional hard drives? Samsung's 860 Pro series is among the best of the best.
Samsung's PRO range of SSDs is incredibly fast considering they connect via slower SATA cables rather than hooking up through PCIe. This also makes them ideal for the Xbox One. All you need to do is purchase a small SSD enclosure to house this drive and manage the connection between it and your console, and you're good to go.
External Ssd For Xbox One
Bottom line
While you cannot go wrong when it comes to external hard drives, especially if you have a few units lying around and simply need to purchase an enclosure, we believe the best option for the Xbox One S and Xbox One X is the WD 4TB My Book. Not only does it add an insane amount of storage to the console, but it also offers great reliability and portability. For our money, it's a must-have Xbox One X accessory.
Our pick
WD 4TB My Book
Boasting a large amount of storage for the price
Western Digital makes some great mechanical drives and this 4TB My Book is a great external storage solution for your Xbox console.
Credits — The team that worked on this guide
Rich Edmonds is a staff reviewer at Windows Central, which means he tests out more software and hardware than he cares to remember. Joining Mobile Nations in 2010, you can usually find him inside a PC case tinkering around when not at a screen fighting with Grammarly to use British words. Hit him up on Twitter: @RichEdmonds.
Jez Corden is a full-time writer for Windows Central, focusing on Xbox, Surface, and Windows PC. He spends the vast majority of his game gaming, or writing about gaming, with a mission to provide gamers in the Microsoft ecosystem the best and most up-to-date info possible.
This post may contain affiliate links. See our disclosure policy for more details.
Best External Hard Drives for Xbox One in 2019
Our pick
WD 4TB My Book
$92 from AmazonRunner-up
Seagate Game Drive Hub 8TB
$130 at AmazonValue pick
WD 1TB My Passport
$50 at AmazonPortable SSD
Samsung 500GB T5
$84 at AmazonSpeedy pick
Samsung 1TB 860 Pro
Buy Xbox Cheap
$308 at AmazonOur pick
WD 4TB My Book
$92 from AmazonHaving seen the worthwhile results of SSD and hybrid drive upgrades on PlayStation 4, it's now Xbox One's turn in the test seat. With its stock 5,400rpm drive turning in loading times of well over a minute in certain titles - such as Just Cause 3 and Grand Theft Auto 5 - Microsoft's machine thankfully has plenty of options to speed up the downtime. One of its trump cards is the ability to connect to any external drive via USB 3.0, making the upgrade path much more fluid than it is on PS4. That is, provided you have one specific tool for the job.
Now, it's possible to buy an external SSD and be done with it - but there's a more affordable path to the same results. For all our tests below, we rely on a simple USB enclosure device that costs in the region of £10-15, allowing us to connect any spare 2.5 inch laptop drive you like to the console. As long as it has a SATA interface, you can even slot in SSD or hybrid drives, and this combo comes in at a significantly lower price. Once connected, there's no lengthy 'backup and restore' process on Xbox One either; you simply copy a game over from the internal to the attached drive, and reap the rewards in faster read speeds.
As a test process, this has made putting this article together much easier than on PS4, but the key hardware is otherwise the same. As before, we're pitting the Xbox One stock drive against a 1TB Seagate hybrid SSHD that relies on a small cache of fast NAND memory to boost access speeds, coming in at around £70. As an upgrade option it doubles the storage space over the console's standard 500GB drive, but also vies for read and write speeds with to a pricey SSD. To show the real deal at work though, we also have a full-fledged OCZ Trion 100 drive that falls around the £100 mark for its 480GB model.
- Order the OCZ Trion 100 480GB[?] or the Seagate 1TB Hybrid SSHD[?] from Amazon with free shipping.
So let's get to the tests, and where better to start than Dead Rising 3 - an Xbox One exclusive that built up some notoriety for its long loading screens at launch. With all patches applied to date, the initial load of 29 seconds on a stock drive isn't the most radical of waits these days - and a possible sign of optimisation since. However, the frequency of loading screens is more the issue here when selecting chapters, and moving to an SSD only shaves eight seconds off its prologue (while a hybrid saves five seconds).
In other words, the upgrade isn't substantial enough for Dead Rising 3 fans to be swayed here. The cumulative gains might stack up for each loading screen by the game's end, but it's one of the smallest gains overall compared to the rest of our tests. Meanwhile, titles like Grand Theft Auto 5 fall on the opposite end of the spectrum - and this brings out the biggest improvement of any game we've seen in moving to an SSD or hybrid on console.
Indeed, there may only be one initial loading screen to it, but the savings are big in Rockstar's blockbuster title. Both solid state and hybrid drives come in at circa 25 seconds for this first load screen - in our case, spawning at O'Neil Way on each to keep the test fair. This shaves over a minute off the Xbox One stock drive's one minute and 28 second wait, and makes Grand Theft Auto 5 one of the main benefactors of an upgrade. Of course, the RAGE engine simply streams assets as we move around the world from here, but it's a clear saving nevertheless.
The story so far is that a hybrid does a close enough job for a lower price - but that's not true in all cases. Notably, The Witcher 3 favours a shift to a full SSD solution, where the game's massive 40GB install can be read with minimal seek times. Novigrad City is our first test here, and for good reason: such a bustling hub provokes one the of the longest waits from the main menu. The initial load comes in at one minute and 39 seconds on Xbox One's stock drive, but the SSD cuts this down to 56 seconds, while our hybrid tails behind at 1 minute 7 seconds.
The crucial point here is that the Seagate hybrid drive is some seconds off the SSD result. It's a similar story for Just Cause 3, an open-world title that continues to frustrate on Microsoft's stock drive, with initial loading times nearing two minutes. The OCZ solid state drive is a clear winner of the trio, of course, cutting that down to 57 per cent of the wait, at just over a minute when first loading into Baia. But the hybrid drive comes surprisingly close in practice, with respawn times here only three seconds off the SSD's recorded time.
Just Cause 3's initial load times remain woeful regardless of your chosen option, but it's still a massive cut - and the stock drive's respawn times are chopped down by a third on SSD and hybrid. This is what we signed up for, and even other open-world projects like Fallout 4 show similar gains. In particular, NPC hubs like Concord town and Diamond city get the biggest mark-up in speed, and the high volumes of data in each spot seemingly gives these faster drives an opportunity to show off faster read speeds. Here, it's a direct 50 per cent halving on the SSD when compared to stock (note: each is loaded from the main menu), while the hybrid trails behind only by 2-5 seconds in these areas.
Loading Time (Seconds) | Xbox Stock Drive | Seagate 1TB SSHD | OCZ Trion 100 480GB |
---|---|---|---|
GTA 5: Initial Load at O'Neil Way | 88.6 | 26.2 | 24.2 |
Dead Rising 3: Initial Load | 29.0 | 23.9 | 21.6 |
Dead Rising 3: Chapter 0 | 19.5 | 15.9 | 15.0 |
Fallout 4: Vault 111 | 33.4 | 30.9 | 20.9 |
Fallout 4 - Exiting Vault 111 | 27.8 | 25.7 | 17.6 |
Fallout 4 - Concord Town | 55.5 | 31.8 | 26.2 |
Fallout 4 - Diamond City | 47.7 | 25.1 | 23.7 |
Just Cause 3 - New Game | 107.4 | 71.8 | 67.6 |
Just Cause 3 - First Mission Respawn | 45.0 | 31.1 | 29.2 |
Just Cause 3 - Baia | 110.4 | 83.1 | 63.2 |
Just Cause 3 - Baia Respawn | 32.0 | 25.9 | 22.3 |
For CD Projekt Red's superb action-RPG, The Witcher 3, the upgrade makes a more tangible difference than in most games. The choice to segregate its world into different regions forces the use of fast travelling, cuing up more loading screens along the road than your typical open-field design. Shifting from Novigrad City to Woesong Bridge, for example, incurs a 47 second wait that drops to just 26 seconds on SSD, while the hybrid falls directly between the two. It's a solid saving either way, but the price of each drive starts to scale with the speed benefits in this case.
The one snag is that dying and respawning in The Witcher 3 remains a patience-testing experience on an upgraded drive. Even with all the data presumably loaded in, both hybrid and SSD take around 50 seconds to respawn into Crookback Bog - a similar timeframe as this area's initial load. This proved an issue on PS4 as well, and it's a shame no common information is reused on reloading the last save nearby.
Project Cars mixes up the formula a bit, relying on a single load per race. Times vary based on the track and number of cars set up beforehand, and in a scenario of 44 AI racers on Le Mans 24 Hours, we hit 50 seconds on the stock drive. On SSD, however, we cut an impressive 14 seconds from that time, which again puts Project Cars among the better cases in terms of the overall percentage we're clawing back.
Loading Time (Seconds) | Xbox Stock Drive | Seagate 1TB SSHD | OCZ Trion 100 480GB |
---|---|---|---|
MGS5: Phantom Limbs | 34.6 | 22.4 | 15.9 |
MGS5: A Hero's Way | 25.1 | 11.4 | 10.6 |
MGS5: C2W | 24.4 | 12.0 | 11.7 |
Project Cars: Willow Springs (16 Cars) | 40.6 | 31.3 | 26.6 |
Project Cars: Azure Cost (31 Cars) | 48.3 | 35.9 | 33.3 |
Project Cars: 24 Hour Le Mans (44 Cars) | 50.1 | 39.4 | 36.5 |
Project Cars: Quit to Menu | 20.1 | 17.6 | 16.6 |
Witcher 3 - Novigrad Town Centre | 99.2 | 67.7 | 56.3 |
Witcher 3 - Fast travel to Woesong Bridge | 47.4 | 33.5 | 26.6 |
Witcher 3 - Crookback Bog | 68.0 | 54.0 | 49.6 |
Witcher 3 - Crookback Bog Respawn | 68.6 | 51.0 | 50.6 |
Rounding out the tests is Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, where regular trips between missions and the command centre can tally up the loading times. Judging by the three missions tested, a hybrid gets a near match for SSD results on this game too - making which to go for a moot point. At under 50 per cent of the wait on stock, it turns out upgrading to either drive is well worth it, and it chops a considerable chunk off that 25-35 second loading screen.
Should you upgrade your Xbox One with an SSD? The Digital Foundry verdict
Overall, there are three lessons learned from our Xbox One tests. The first is obvious; an SSD is a premium, costly solution that gets the job done better than any alternative - especially fors stock solution, the full potential of both the SSD and hybrid isn't being tapped into at all. On PC, this OCZ SSD can hit peak read rates of up to 550Mbps via a direct SATA 3 connection - but Xbox One's peak transfer rate is capped significantly. Even with this bottleneck though, the improvement is clear, and benefits come mainly through the minimal seek times with solid-state tech.
Loading Time (Seconds) | Xbox Stock Drive | Xbox SSHD | Xbox SSD | PS4 Stock Drive | PS4 SSHD | PS4 SSD |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Average (like-for-like tests) | 54.1 | 36.9 | 31.8 | 43.9 | 38.3 | 31.6 |
Total | 1138.0 | 701.6 | 605.0 | 835.3 | 728.6 | 601.5 |
Learning BASIC in the shadow of the bomb.
Last but not least, it's interesting to compare the upgrade experience with that on PS4. Simply put, it's a far easier process on Xbox One, where rather than replacing the console's internal HDD (where PS4 demands that you back up all your data in advance), this is a simple plug-and-play route. It does involve a USB enclosure, but it means we can still use the machine's existing stock drive in combination with the external - doubling up the space, and letting us choose which drive to use per game.
How to clean leather car seats infiniti. As for the net gains in loading speeds, Xbox One benefits more than PS4 in its move to an SSD - for the simple fact its stock drive has proven slower on average than Sony's chosen unit. To explain this, Xbox One takes 19 minutes in total to run through all the above tests on its stock drive in on go. Meanwhile, PS4 achieves the same feat in 15 minutes across all the very same games. In upgrading to an SSD on each though, this total figure becomes almost identical at ten minutes for both PS4 and Xbox One.
Overall, it makes the question of whether to upgrade your Xbox One drive much easier to answer. The benefits are greater on Microsoft's machine, and it's also much easier to implement. Given the sheer size of game installs so far this generation as well, where the stock 500GB limit doesn't cut it for convenience, it's quickly becoming a necessity to have that second pool of space at the ready. The only question remains: how fast do you want it?
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