Seagate Game Drive for Xbox, 2TB, External Hard Drive Portable, USB 3.2 Gen 1, Black with built-in green LED bar, Xbox Certified, 2 year Rescue Services (STKX2000400)

Product Information

You want more space: Capping at a 1TB model, you won’t have drastically more storage space to work with.

You won’t actually notice much difference in terms of general gameplay, so the main advantage of an SSD is the significant reductions in your loading times. Here, much depends on the individual game. Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t really load any faster with an SSD than it does with an external HDD, but when loading saved games it’s a different story. While you could be looking at a nearly two minute (133 second) wait on Xbox One X with an external HDD, that drops to just 71 seconds with an SSD. Essentially any external hard drive will be compatible with Xbox One in 2023. Just keep in mind that the console itself formats storage in exFAT, and the majority of hard drives are formatted to something like NTFS out of the box. This means you may have to format the drive before using it with an Xbox One, and that you won't be able to use it for anything else. When you format the drive, you'll lose all the data already on there, so keep that in mind.

Too many games, too little storage? Our pick of the best external hard drives for Xbox One can give you all the space you need

The Seagate Xbox Storage Expansion Card is the first product that arises in conversations about the best Xbox Series X SSDs. Launching the same year as the console itself, it enjoyed a reputation as the be-all-end-all of storage expansion for Microsoft’s current-gen machine. That may not be as true now as it was before 2023, but it’s still a superb choice for gamers looking to greatly increase storage capacity. Let’s assume you want to keep your entire game library installed. It depends a little bit on how many games you own, although if you’re in the market for an external hard drive you’re clearly looking to install more than just Fortnite, Apex Legends and the latest FIFA. So, what if you're not looking to spend a ridiculous amount of money, but you still need a fair bit of extra storage? If you're looking to reduce your problems with storing older titles, this 4TB hard drive from WD will remove most of your woes. Its USB-C port can be used on your devices as either a USB-A or USB-C connection and in our testing, we got the same speeds through either port so it shouldn't matter which you have free or available, or if you change the device it's used with during its lifetime. There's a small but clear LED indicator on one of the short ends which is always a help, but one small downside is that it does get a little warm when in use so it'll pay to keep that in mind when positioning it. Compared to running games on a standard external HDD we managed to decrease loading times on Resident Evil 7 from game selection to gameplay from around 90 seconds to just one minute. Transfer times here worked great too. It only took us 3 minutes 48 seconds to move 30GB compared to 7:16 when using an HDD.

Although Toshiba sells a gaming-specific version of its Canvio external HDD, the Canvio Flex is the current king when it comes to price, performance and value. It’s cheaper than most competitors, yet also one of the fastest portable HDDs we’ve tested. Our PC benchmarks place its sequential read/write speeds over a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A connection at 151.5MB/sec and 158.9MB/sec. When it comes to loading saved games on the Xbox One, it’s a second or two faster than the Seagate Expansion Portable and only just behind the Seagate Firecuda HDD in most of our test titles. It’s a great drive for hosting your Games Pass favourites if you don’t want to splash a lot of cash. You can also get 2TB and 4TB versions.It's totally up to you whether you go for capacity in the form of HDD, or shoot for faster performance in the form of an SSD. No matter what you choose, one of the best Xbox One hard drives will be an extremely handy tool to have in your console's loadout. We run two sets of tests when we’re looking at external hard drives for the Xbox One or One X. First, we connect them to a PC and run the CrystalDiskMark benchmark to test their raw sequential and random read/write speeds. Sequential speeds are an indication of how fast the drive can read or write large quantities of data in one sustained burst, which makes a big difference when you’re first running a game, loading a saved game, streaming in all the models and textures in a level, or transferring a game from one drive to another. Random read/write speeds cover smaller data transfers, and make an impact when you’re running a game directly from the hard drive.

If you do decide to invest, you will be getting a speedy drive that’s a touch slower than the one installed in the console out of the box. It’s nonetheless still a fantastic option for extra storage, especially for all the Series X|S enhanced titles that regularly land on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. However, previous-gen Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles can be run from these drives with a slight bump in load times, though. Read on, then, to learn more about the best Xbox Series X hard drives and SSDs to help boost storage and performance for your console. Besides our top two choices, you’ll still be able to store your Xbox Series X|S games on all of our other options. The difference is that you won’t be able to run the games from them. Whilst we will do everything we can to meet the delivery times above, there may be factors outside of our control and we cannot guarantee delivery within this time frame. in one of the best Xbox One external hard drives will go far. We're talking around 50 games, depending on what they are. Smaller, retro style games may only take up a few gigs, while some newer AAA titles are upwards of 80-100GB. Either way, 2TB is sure to futureproof you. Do all external hard drives work with Xbox One?Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland and the Scottish Highlands) may take longer to reach you.