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)

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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.

With games this big, it makes sense to expand your PS5’s storage capabilities with an external hard drive. Unfortunately, since external drives are too slow to run PS5 games, you can only store titles on them rather than play games from there directly – for that you’ll need to install a compatible NVMe SSD. Instead, what external drives are great for is housing an extensive library of PS4 games as these can be played without a hitch. This avoids taking up valuable PS5 storage with games that don’t need to be there. A full install of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II with the Warzone 2.0 Battle Royale mode will take well over 100GB on the internal SSD. Ditto for Forza Horizon 5. Go for this year’s big exclusive, Starfield, and you’re looking at around 125GB. Sign up to Xbox Games Pass and make use of its extensive library, and you could see your available storage space reduced to zero before you know it. With a 5,400 RPM drive, you're again looking at standard performance for older games. Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Original Xbox games won't load extra fast, but you also won't have any issues playing these games. You'll also be able to keep your SSD space clear for the handful of titles that you are playing. There are some cosmetic reasons to go for the FireCuda Gaming Hard Drive, not least that it comes in a range of different designs featuring classic Xbox heroes and Marvel and Star Wars fan favourites. Like the FireCuda SSD, it also has a cool illuminated bar on the front edge that flashes when the drive is busy. Yet the real reason to pay a little extra is that its performance is very good. On paper, the Toshiba Canvio Flex has faster sequential read/write speeds, while its random read/write speeds aren’t far behind. In practice, though, we found the FireCuda slightly faster to load some games and two or three seconds faster when loading save games, although the Toshiba had the edge on Prey. The difference isn’t that significant, but if you like the styling then this drive won’t let you down when it comes to performance.While 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, and there’s precious little in it between the Canvio Flex and Canvio Gaming when it comes to random read/write speeds. Plugged into the Xbox Series X, it’s very competitive with the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hard Drive, taking four seconds longer to load a saved game in Prey, but coming first by just under three seconds in Red Dead Redemption 2. You can also save a minute or so over slower drives when it comes to moving or copying installed games. Sure, it’s nowhere near as speedy as an SSD, but if you just want a drive for archiving Series S/X games and playing your old Xbox One favourites, this could be all you need.

How to choose the best external hard drive for your Xbox One What are the most important things to look for? 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. Yet the best reason to pay the extra is the performance. On paper, the Toshiba Canvio Gaming has faster sequential read/write speeds, but the FireCuda isn’t far behind, and it actually outpaces the Toshiba when it comes to copying games, loading games and loading saved games, by 3 seconds in The Last of Us Part II and 5 seconds in God of War. Given that the Canvia Gaming is one of the fastest gaming HDDs we’ve tested, that’s an impressive result. Come for the styling, stay for the speeds.The best external hard drives for Xbox One in 2023 1. Toshiba Canvio Flex: Best all-round hard drive for Xbox One 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. 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. Those few drives that do support the best Xbox Series X games are well worth your hard-earned cash. If only because they greatly expand the console’s approximate 800GB of workable storage. Yes, the box might claim 1TB from the get-go, but that’s not including the space required for the Xbox Series X’s operating system. It’s a similar story on the Xbox Series S, too, which only features roughly 364GB of operational storage despite the 512GB claim.