What are some good internal or external hard drive options

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I use a WD My Book 4TB drive on my X1 and it's routinely on-sale for around $100.  Has worked great for over a year and never been an issue since it was installed.

 
I am thinking about buying an Xbox One but I will need to upgrade the 500 gb storage, first does it use external hard drives or it strictly internal? Also what are the best HD's on the market for it? as in most gamers use this

 
The Xbox One is great in the sense that you can install and play games from an external USB drive.  The best drive would depend on your taste, as there are two different types:

  • portable - pulls power from the USB connection to the console - current max size of 2TB - more expensive per GB
  • not portable - pulls power from an AC adapter plugged into the wall - current max size of 5TB (or maybe 6TB?) - less expensive per GB
I prefer the portable drives because I can swap them out between the upstairs and downstairs console so I don't have to re-download a game on both consoles.  I just bought another 2TB Seagate portable USB HDD from Nebraska Furniture Mart yesterday for $78+tax because my first one is full and the internal HDD is starting to fill also (I don't like deleting games), but if I fill this one too then I will probably have to consider a not portable version and hope it is painless enough to move between the two consoles.

But anyway, both drives I have are Seagate 2TB drives and they've been working out great.

 
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I just got a pretty good price on a Samsung 500GB SSD external drive ($125, about 30 bucks cheaper than most sellers).  It's gonna be a step down from my non-SSD 2TB drive in terms of storage, but I can get by with 1TB total until SSDs get more reasonably priced, and the speed increase should be well worth it. Plan is to put most of the singleplayer focused games wiiht long load times (Witcher 3, GTA V, etc) on the SSD, that's where I should see the most benefit. Multiplayer-focused stuff and backwards compatible games can stay on the stock internal drive. I'll probably post again after I've had a chance to test it, but there are already plenty of sites out there that have run tests.

It sucks that anything over the 500GB mark is still obscenely priced (a 1 TB SSD external will run you upwards of 350 bucks), but like everything related to storage, it'll keep going down over time.

 
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KaneRobot said:
I just got a pretty good price on a Samsung 500GB SSD external drive ($125, about 30 bucks cheaper than most sellers). It's gonna be a step down from my non-SSD 2TB drive in terms of storage, but I can get by with 1TB total until SSDs get more reasonably priced, and the speed increase should be well worth it. Plan is to put most of the singleplayer focused games wiiht long load times (Witcher 3, GTA V, etc) on the SSD, that's where I should see the most benefit. Multiplayer-focused stuff and backwards compatible games can stay on the stock internal drive. I'll probably post again after I've had a chance to test it, but there are already plenty of sites out there that have run tests.

It sucks that anything over the 500GB mark is still obscenely priced (a 1 TB SSD external will run you upwards of 350 bucks), but like everything related to storage, it'll keep going down over time.
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Wouldn't putting an SSD into a USB enclosure be a waste? Isn't the bottleneck going to be the USB interface?

 
chnandler_bong said:
Wouldn't putting an SSD into a USB enclosure be a waste? Isn't the bottleneck going to be the USB interface?
Click to expand...
As long as it's a UASP-class enclosure, then it wouldn't be much of a waste, though the big issue is $/GB. Biggest SSD you're going to find is a 2TB one and a very expensive price point, $600 - $900, depending on the brand. A 1TB SSD would be in the $200-$400 range, again, depending on the drive you're picking. You would get some speed increases if you used a UASP-class enclosure, which allows for faster transfers on USB 3.0, though you would have some capacity issues.

A middleground would be to use something like a SSHD 3.5" hybrid drive, like this Seagate drive:

http://smile.amazon.com/Seagate-Gaming-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST4000DX001/dp/B00FQH7MQ2/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1455227095&sr=1-4&keywords=SSHD

Again, a UASP-class external enclosure would be needed for maximum performance, like this one here:

http://smile.amazon.com/StarTech-com-3-5-Inch-Enclosure-Upright-S3510BMU33B/dp/B00K3HEYA2

 
Update - got the SSD drive today. And yeah, there is a heck of a difference.

A few tests I ran. Again, this is the Samsung T1 External SSD - 500 GB. Ran each test twice, listing the best number received. Scenarios on each test were identical.

 
MORTAL KOMBAT X
Internal storage - Fade up on copyright screen to being able to skip to start - 0:20
SSD - Fade up on copyright screen to being able to skip to start - 0:19
5% decrease
 
Internal storage - Single Fight vs. CPU - from loading bar appearing to match fading in - 0:11
SSD - Single Fight vs. CPU - from loading bar appearing to match fading in - 0:09
18% decrease
 
GTA V
Internal storage - "Loading story mode" screen to opening cutscene - 01:02
SSD - "Loading story mode" screen to opening cutscene - 0:22
65% decrease

 
The Witcher 3

Internal storage - Continue option on title screen to playable - 01:15
SSD - Continue option on title screen to playable - 0:48
36% decrease


 
Note that transitions between menus also were faster, which can save an extra few seconds here and there. The initial loading splash screen you get when you launch a game from the dashboard was also noticeably faster to finish loading.
 
I kind of wanted to run a few more tests but I was impressed enough to stop there. Stuff that isn't too massive like MKX saw meager increases, but there was a MASSIVE difference for larger stuff like GTA V and The Witcher 3. I've read elsewhere that an SSD also noticably improves the performance of Fallout 4 on the X1 as it can load things on the fly more quickly. One thing to keep in mind is the non-SSD USB 3.0 drives that are significantly cheaper will probably return a close improvement to the smaller stuff like MKX (ie 1 second faster vs 2 seconds faster), but not the big stuff like GTA.
 
So, if you don't play a lot of singleplayer games (not much point in loading faster if you're just going to be waiting for others) and/or you don't mind load times as much, obviously YMMV. To me, the money was well spent. 


Yeah, kind of sucks to go from 2.5 TB total down to 1 TB total, but I'm really only playing 3 or 4 games at a time so I can definitely live with it until external 1 - 2 TB SSD drives drop in price.

 
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