As your regular Xbox One hard drive fills up, you’re going to have to invest in an external one. Not only will it increase your storage capacity, but also decrease the loading time of your games.
Today, we’re going to go over some of the most common questions people have when thinking about getting a new external hard drive for Xbox One:
Which model should you get?
Choosing the best external hard drive for Xbox One mostly depends on how much storage space you’re looking for. 1TB units are available for $60, and you can even get the 6TB ones for $250 if you have extra money to spare. In between the two extremes, there are the 2TB and 4TB models, so there’s plenty of options to choose from.
The next choice you have to make is whether you want an external hard drive with a separate power source or not. Some of them require an AC adapter, and these tend to be faster. If you’re still in doubt, generally speaking, it’s best to go with the faster ones.
As a general rule of thumb, you should avoid the no-name brands to make sure your purchase will last.
How to install the external drive?
Just plug it into your console, and you’re all set (it doesn’t even need to be turned off). The setup will ask you whether you want to format the new storage device or not. Just select ‘yes’. A note of warning: you cannot share your newly formatted drive with any other platforms.
The only thing left to do is assign a name to your drive and choose whether you want to perform the default installation procedure. Selecting ‘yes’ is a very smart move, since any games you install will be placed on the external and not the internal drive, allowing them to load faster.
Formatting the drive should only take a couple of seconds.
What about the management?
It’s recommended to move all the games to the newly-installed external drive because of the performance boost benefits this brings. Unfortunately, there is no bulk move operation that would accomplish this for you in a single move, so you’re going to need to move each game separately.
However, Xbox One does allow for a way to make this process a little bit less tedious. By selecting all of the games you want to move, you can make Xbox One continue relocating them until every last instance is moved. Pro tip: this even works in sleep mode, so you won’t have to fear having to start over if the console is left unattended for too long.
You can initiate the process from the “My games and apps” menu.
Finally, make sure you don’t forget to change the “My games and apps” setting back to all or external after you’re done.
Conclusion
As you can see, an external hard drive is a great addition to your Xbox One. It will not only provide you with more than enough space for all your storage needs, but also make your games load faster, and there are plenty of models to choose from.
