How to Use External Hard Drives with Xbox One

While the capacity of games is getting bigger, the internal hard drive of your Xbox One remains the same! There are many games that are reaching over 100GB, and with the default storage on Xbox varying from 500GB to 1TB, your gaming console will be full soon.

Get more storage for your games through USB like external hard drive!

You’ll have to get an external hard drive for your Xbox sooner or later to increase your storage space for games and also for loading games slightly quicker.

Now you would ask how to choose an external drive? Well, we are here to help you with this guide how to select and use an external drive with your Xbox.

Choosing an external hard drive for Xbox One

The console supports the use of external drives, making it easy to expand your storage space for games and other content. When choosing a drive, your first consideration should be how much space you want. The console has a 16TB limit on external storage size, so for many, the sky is the limit. For context, 1TB externals run in the $60 range, though we recommend thinking longer term and going with at least 2TB. Drives with 4TB and 8TB offer a little more room to freely install games, especially for those on Xbox One X that take advantage of 4K assets.

Your other option would be picking up an external hard drive enclosure and stick the hard drive of your choice inside of it. This is a good option for people who already have a decent sized spare hard drive that’s collecting dust — you’ll just need to buy the enclosure. You can also recycle any old PC or laptop hard drives you have laying around, essentially making for a free drive.

Installing your hard drive

With your drive in-hand, it’s time to connect it to the Xbox One. The console doesn’t have to be turned off when you connect the drive, although connecting and disconnecting peripherals while powered down never hurts. Here’s how to get the drive up and running:

  • Connect the drive to a vacant USB port on your Xbox One
  • Select Yes when asked how to configure the drive
  • Enter a drive name
  • If you want to install games on it by default, select Yes when prompted

Managing your new drive

With your external drive installed and formatted, you’re ready to install and copy games onto it. We recommend moving all but the lowest-priority games onto the new drive so that they can benefit from the performance increase it brings. Follow the steps below to transfer games between your internal and external drive in bulk:

  • Go to Settings app on Xbox One
  • Scroll down to the System tab
  • Choose Storage
  • Select your internal drive
  • Select Transfer
  • Select the games you wish to move from your Xbox One console

Note: Ensure the storage required for the selected games is less or equal to the available storage on your external drive. Alternatively, you can choose Select all to automatically select the entire contents of your old console

  • Choose Move selected
  • Select which drive you wish to move games onto
  • Hit Move to begin the transfer

After you’re done moving your games, the “My Games & Apps” menu will now display the total combined free storage and percentage of used storage on the left side of the screen.

Xbox supports a wide variety of playing media files including videos like AVI, MP4, MOV and many more. You have Xbox 360 and an AVI video on it, but not able to play the file! Well, it indicates the corruption of video file. So to fix the unplayable AVI file on Xbox 360, make use of Hi5 AVI File Repair Software that can be easily installed on Windows as well as Mac operating systems.

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