Does that mean I can’t store my games on the external hard drive? power you can, another thing is you can play directly from them. In any case, you will be interested to know which ones you can send the hard drive to be able to play them without problems, leaving space on the SSD and which ones cannot. Of course, when playing from HDD forget features like Quick Resume which allows you to continue with the games where you left off. Don’t forget to save your games like you do on other platforms so you don’t lose your progress.
How to identify games optimized for Xbox Series?
It’s very simple, just follow these steps:
- Press the Xbox button, located in the center of the controller.
- This will open the console interface, go to my games and apps and select see all.
- In Games, select Optimized for Xbox Series X | S and you will get all the games only if you copy them to the hard disk, you cannot play them directly from the hard disk.
With the rest you can do it, but you will lose the game loading speed and the benefits of having an SSD drive.
An Xbox hard drive for backups
The physical format is dead these days and it’s a slab, not only is it uncomfortable to get up again and again to pull the game out of the console, put it in its box, look for the next game and put it in the console slot, but also if we have to reinstall it, we find that the Blu Ray player is very slow. Also, if we have an internet connection, what the console will do is fetch the installable from the store to download it from the internet, since it is much faster.
On the other hand, if we have an Xbox Series, buying any game from the console’s digital store, we are going to have to save it in the console’s storage unit and this means that it will take up space on it . Well, what better than having to connect to the internet to save it to an external hard drive. Of course, we must clarify that storing a game in this way for backup copies or to run it does not mean that we can use it on another user’s console. Installations are encrypted with a unique identification key provided to you by our console.
Moreover, since external USB interfaces are much faster even than console network card, once you want to fetch games from external drive, it will be much faster to do so and without the need an Internet connection. So having one of these drives just for backup isn’t a bad idea at all.
Isn’t official console storage better?
As for playing the games directly, yes, since only with the cards xbox official memory we can do both. That is, store games and play from them. Whereas as we have explained, with a hard drive we can only store and read those that have not been optimized for the new console. Which means that as soon as a title is upgraded to the next generation, we can no longer run it from an external hard drive.
Although it should be borne in mind that storage on an SSD disk is much more expensive than on a classic hard disk. And even if we cannot play optimized games directly, what interests us is having our game repository without having to access the network. The Memory card official Xbox, which is a CF Express card modified, this is the best option of all, there is no doubt. The problem comes from the cost of storage. Remember that we are talking about using an external hard drive to leave our games in a safe place and be able to play those that are not optimized for the Xbox Series directly.
What is the best external hard drive for your Xbox Series X|S?
Once the relevant explanations have been provided, it is necessary to make a quick selection of the hard drives currently on sale and which we recommend above the average. In any case, it is necessary to take into account a series of points to take into account for the selection:
- The bone USB sockets of the console are 3.2 with a transfer capacity of 10 Gbps, for real purposes this translates to 1 GB/s for reading and writing if you use the appropriate drive. An external SSD, however, does not give you the advantages of the official memory card or the internal SSD that we talked about in the first section of this article.
- And Hard disk by its nature it cannot exceed certain speeds, which is why it is totally the same whether it is internal or external. Performance will be exactly the same. Its advantage is therefore not speed, but its storage capacity.
So, in our selection, we have excluded all external SSDs, not only because they do not offer us the advantages of internal storage and official memory cards, but also because of the high cost of each gigabyte of storage. Our advice is that before buying an external SSD for the console, consider the official storage, what size? It doesn’t matter which one best suits your budget.
That said, we’re going to give you our quick pick of external hard drives for the Xbox Series.
WD BLACK P10 5TB Game Drive
With a high storage capacity and a price of 140 dollars on average, the WD Black P10 5TB Game Drive from Western Digital is distinguished not only by the Xbox logo on the case, but also by its large storage capacity. And it is that you will be able to have more than 100 games inside.
In case you are a user not of an Xbox Series, but of an Xbox One, then we recommend it 100%, because you will be able to play your favorite games, directly and without having to worry about them. download again from new . And all this without performance problems.
2TB Seagate Expansion
If your budget is not very high and you need a hard drive for your Xbox Series or Xbox One console, then you may not need 5TB of storage and 2TB will suffice.
This is why the 2TB Seagate Expansion, which is usually 80 dollars without discount on Amazon, seems to us an excellent option in case you need to expand the storage of your Xbox and do not leave a large sum of money. Of course, it takes second place due to the fact that the cost per gigabyte is higher than in the previous case.
Toshiba Canvio Basics 1TB
Our final option is the simplest of them all, a 1TB hard drive for your Xbox, which you’ll find for just over $50 with no discount on Amazon.
the Toshiba Canvio Basics 1TB It has the worst price-to-storage ratio of the three, but it’s the one that’ll cost you the least of them all. And as in the other cases, if you have games that are not optimized for the Xbox Series, it will also serve as a drive to be able to play these games without spending internal SSD storage, although without its advantages.
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