Your Xbox Series X or Series S comes with built-in storage, but game titles are huge and that will fill up fast. Here are some external hard drives to help!
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Microsoft’s latest generation of consoles, the Xbox Series X and S, have a unique feature — the ability to play almost every game going back to the original Xbox through back compatibility. Thanks to speedy storage and a powerful AMD-designed APU unit, they’re no slouch playing modern titles. The main drawback is the limited internal storage space. The Xbox Series X has roughly 802 GB of usable storage, while the Xbox Series S has only 364 GB. Looking at modern game sizes, like « Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II » at 121.2 GB, you can see how quickly that internal drive can fill up.
Microsoft allowed the Xbox Series X and S to plug in external storage drives to expand the usable capacity. There’s even an official storage expansion card, which is expensive but runs at the same speeds as the internal drive so that you can run modern games off it. External drives connected via USB can only boot back compatible games from prior console generations or those downloaded from Game Pass. An external drive can also temporarily store current-generation game data, so you don’t have to re-download it. Because you’re limited to older games, the type and speed of the external drive matter less — they all load games in a similar timeframe. That doesn’t mean you should grab any no-name external hard drive. We’ve compiled a list of our favorite external hard drives for your Xbox Series X or S based on reliability and cost.
The Xbox Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S is the only external storage option that allows the boot up of next-gen games and playing them. The proprietary card slots into the Xbox Series X or S to deliver the total bandwidth of the custom SSD technologies used in the console. You should expect your console to act as if your internal hard drive got extended to a higher capacity because that’s essentially what happens when you plug it in.
Seagate still has an exclusivity deal for the technology, meaning only one manufacturer is selling the expansion cards. Available in 512GB capacity ($109.99 MSRP at Amazon), 1TB capacity ($199.99 at Amazon), and 2TB capacity ($359.99 at Amazon), the expansion cards have often retailed higher than that price during the ongoing chip shortage. That higher price might be worth it to you if you prefer the convenience of having more of your Xbox Series X or S games installed on storage that behaves as if it was an internal drive.
USB-based external hard drives to be used with your Xbox Series X or S fall into two camps — spinning hard drives or solid-state drives. Buying a mechanical spinning hard drive gives you more gigabytes for your dollar. Seagate’s Expansion portable series uses USB 3.1 Gen 1 connectivity for plug-and-play compatibility with your console. The drive doesn’t need an external power supply, pulling all the energy it needs through its USB micro-B to USB-A cable. Thanks to its size, the Expansion range is easily movable which is handy if you have multiple Xbox Series X or S consoles.
The platters inside the drive spin at 5,400 RPM. That would have meant read and write speeds near 75 MB/s (via Datarecovery.com) but thanks to using newer drive technology those speeds will be higher. That’s enough speed to run Xbox One titles without upgrades, or backward compatible Xbox 360 or original Xbox games. The 2TB model triples your Xbox Series X’s storage for $89.99 (at Staples), or you can add up to 5TB of storage for $149.99 (at Amazon) and go wild downloading Game Pass titles.
Western Digital is one of the leading names in data storage and this WD Elements is a no-frills, budget-friendly portable hard drive with 4TB of capacity. It uses a 5,400 RPM hard drive which gives all the speed you’d expect from a modern drive that isn’t using solid-state tech, which is enough performance to play backward compatible games once installed on the drive.
