Sunday, January 15, 2017

Finally bought an external drive for my Xbox

It's one of this and the last gaming cycles biggest controversies: Xbox will let you download, store, play and TRANSPORT your games on an external drive and PlayStation won't. Now to be fair, it wasn't too big a deal before all these digital day one downloads started popping up. I mean yes you might download a new map pack, or a few updates, a couple of arcade games but until ALL the games started downloading onto your actual system hard drive space took a long time to use up. But if you ask your friends with a PS4 or an Xbox one, they will tell you even if you own the disk the game still downloads onto the hard drive taking up prime hard drive space. 30-50 GB doesn't seem like much until you have downloaded 10 games onto your system and THEN it's like well damn I'm almost out of space.

Microsoft to the rescue, go buy you a nice 1, 2, 4, 5, or 6 TB external drive and boom you now have more gaming space and what do you know you can also transport those games like you used to with the old little memory cards back in the PlayStation one and Dreamcast days. So you don't have to take all your disks with you. as long as you keep your hands on it you can take you digital library anywhere you go. I got the MY Passport X from WD, I could have got the one from Seagate(and I might in the future if I decide to buy that external hard drive enclosure that gives you 3 extra usb ports) but while I usually like green MEH, I like black too. The set up is pretty basic, unpack the drive attach the usb 3 cord, plug it into your xbox, boot it up, FORMAT IT....



Uh oh, I think I just scared a lot of people with that one, yes you have to format the external drive to be able to save games onto it. So thus you might want to scour amazon, walmart, or best buy for some drives they have on sale(or if you are a reward zone member, use some of those trusty points you have saved up) yes you COULD use a solid state drive for speed, but at the current cost I say just get more space, as long as you use one of the USB 3 ports you shouldn't have a problem with loading the games quickly. Hell It transferred over my Games with gold version of DoA(10 GB) in about 6 minutes, and has the 29.7 GB version of Killer Instinct up to 86% in about 20. Now I know some might be asking, "why get the passport version, you can get more space for the same price with a my book or my cloud from WD or a Backup desktop from Seagate. Yes but that would be a POWERED external drive and if it just so happens that the power to your drive gets burned out, yanked out, or damaged:No games for you! so when it comes to things like that I prefer passports, 90% of the time they work just fine and if a problem arises you still have to pry the damn thing open and pull the drive out(not a lot of fun). What is a lot of fun though will be taking my games from my house to someone else's and still being able to play my games, because IF I do start buying more digital games it's gonna suck having to constantly lug around MY game system just to play them on the road.

Unless of course I am at a hotel then, meh depending on how long I'm going I may bring one with me. Hell most gaming systems double as blue ray players now, the force awakens anyone? Another thing since you have to format the drive in order to use it don't take a drive that already has stuff on it, but a fresh one. And while yes thumb drives are starting to have wild amounts of space on them(I believe there is a 512 one out now) and the price is starting to come down, I really don't recommend using thumb drives for external storage like that YET, they get up to 1 TB why not.
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I've had mine a few months now and I really haven't had too many issues, I think there was one was one game that had a hiccup for a short amount of time oh yeah I remember for some odd strange reason my X-box doesn't like to play my pinball version of Civil War, plays Deadpool just fine but Civil War nope. Oh for those wondering I used the arrows because I am actually going to finish this post with more information after extended use instead of making it a "Throwback Thursday" post, mainly because I remember what I want to say about the hard drive and it's not really time sensitive. after months of use were there headaches? Nope, hell I even had to factory reset my X-box because it wouldn't start up correctly one day, must have been a glitch in an update as mine stays in "standby mode" or quick start, basically it's supposed to download all my updates AND not fully shut down so it's only a few seconds from a dashboard similar to a laptop when you shut the lid, a few seconds of spinning and then your log in screen. of the available like 2.6/2.7 TB's of space available to me I still have 65.7%(1.6 TB) left of all storage(there is an option in your Games & App section to see internal, external, or all) I've used 51.5% of my internal 1 TB hard drive, 27.1% of the external drive which is of course two terabytes.

I mentioned before that there is an external drive enclosure for the Xbox one(though I do not know if it works for the Xbox one S, so if it doesn't sorry one S users) that allows you to put in another drive(usually a laptop drive) for more storage as well as gives you an extra 3 USB ports for the one you give up on the side, yes it increases the real estate your Xbox takes up but 3 USB ports and if you have the cash for it possibly a faster SSD (Solid State Drive) to help you store more of your games. I'm sure we are all moving towards SSD and when the prices become comparable to Sata drives I'll be all up on it, but for right now ummm I ain laying out that much cash. Currently a 1 TB SSD is between 250-350 between Best Buy and Amazon, or the same price as a 2 or 3 passport style portable 4 TB hard drives, but that's me and I like a combination of bang for my buck as well as performance. On my Wordpress blog I mentioned during my E3 coverage that they were bringing out the Xbox Scorpio later this year, hopefully I can just move my passport drives over from the Xbox one to the Xbox Scorpio when it comes out and if so that will make my decision on whether to buy one or not less of an if to more of a when. Mainly because if it really is a seamless transition who doesn't want to move up to a stronger machine? Xbox anywhere would become Xbox awesomeness am I right? Not only do you not have to worry about your old discs not playing in your new machine, but your digital library just works without any updates, downloads, or remasters and that my friends is what true next gen gaming would be. I have heard that for at least Microsoft and Sony the new kids on the block will play the old kids games, just with some upscaling for the older titles but won't change formats, though with the rise in digital copy purchases for games that maybe be a problem that solves itself anyway.

But yes, if you have the opportunity to buy an external drive(and like I said you can get a 4 TB external passport from best buy or amazon for around 150 bucks) I recommend it, hopefully(and it's been years so that hope is steadily fading at least for this generation) Sony gets on board with allowing you to create external gaming storage instead of just an external backup and BOTH systems can push this format. Granted I know why Sony is less inclined BLU RAY is their baby and every game printed on disc has to pay them a royalty, but with HD space growing so quickly, high speed internet becoming so wide spread, and the love of NOT having to swap out discs becoming every gamers preference it's a wave they won't be able to fight much longer

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