First of all, you will need a 2.5-inch hard drive whether it’s an HDD or an SSD both work with this enclosure. You can use others but make sure it is USB 3.1 so it works well with the Series X.
In this example, I’m using a 256GB SSD from Crucial. You can get larger ones for a relatively cheap price and Crucial are reliable. I used this drive for an old iMac upgrade but have decided temporarily to use it on my Xbox as I was rapidly running out of space, and I didn’t fancy paying a fortune for the Series X Seagate expansion card.
The Seagate expansion card allows for extremely fast storage exactly the same as included internally. So you can understand the cost.
So once you have got your hard drive sorted and your enclosure ( I used the Orico enclosure from Amazon )has arrived you easily slot the hard drive into the enclosure as shown. There are no screws needed and is very easy to do. Once this is done connect the USB cable to one the USB A ports on the back of the console.
Once connected you will be prompted to use it as an extension to your Xbox storage or just for movies, pictures & music. Just select the Xbox one and it will format your hard drive to work with your console. It shouldn’t take long at all to format and then you can start moving games across.
The good thing with Xbox is that you can move XS-optimised games to the external drive temporarily and then move back if you want to play them again. In my example, I moved a couple of large Xbox One games over and that way they can run direct from the external hard drive. The only way you could play Series X optimised games is by using the official Seagate 1TB memory card. I think I may get this one day once the prices have dropped but for now, this allows me to keep some old Xbox One games on my console and frees some space up on my internal drive.
I would recommend getting the 4TB hard disk drive on amazon.. yes it’s not as fast as this drive but it’s so much cheaper and you can basically download all the Xbox Games on Game Pass and put it on the external drive. Saves downloading all the time and you’ll always have something to play.
It’s fairly straightforward to manage your storage you can find it in the system settings. Bonus tip you can filter your Xbox games by location in the main menu so that can be handy to sort the games with.
Basically, you can transfer a 100GB game in less than 5 minutes which is a lot easier than re-downloading the game every time you fancy playing it. Unfortunately, PS5 users have to do this as they can’t even transfer PS5 games over to an external drive temporarily which must be frustrating.
In summary, this is a great affordable way to get some external storage plus if you have the enclosure you can easily upgrade the drive at a later date. Maybe one day when 4TB SSDs are cheaper an upgrade may be on the cards.
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