PSA: Be Careful Using The Xbox Series X With An External Hard Drive

It's something to be wary of.

Xbox Series X

So the Xbox Series X | S is now out, and one of the benefits is that it includes compatibility with a lot of previous gen hardware, including external hard drives. However, external hard drives might not be the best way to experience the wonders of next-gen right now. Allow me to explain. Also, this is just from my personal experience, so it’s possible it might just be affecting me.

 

What’s Wrong With External Hard Drives?

It’s not that they don’t work. They’ll play games about as well as the Xbox One does, but they won’t load games even half as quickly as the Xbox Series X’s internal SSD will. That thing is incredibly fast.

However, the real issue for me came when trying to both play a game off my external hard drive while moving games from external to internal. While transferring games, I’ve tried playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, Tekken 7 and LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, both of which have taken longer to load than they ever did on the Xbox One. LEGO and Tekken 7 took over a minute just to reach the intro cutscene, not including developer movies, while Tony Hawk’s wouldn’t let me skip the intro cutscene and took about a minute or so to load into a level.

After pausing the transfer and installations, I tried playing Tony Hawk’s again, and the load times were more comparable with the Xbox One X load times, with perhaps a slight graphical improvement. Maybe that’s just confirmation bias though. However, as soon as it was added to the internal SSD, load times became ludicrously quick. Note: I wasn’t transferring Tony Hawk’s as I was playing it, merely transferring other games.

Even when games were being transferred, Tony Hawk’s loading times were incredibly fast. Just be careful when you do pick up an Xbox Series X | S. If you’re too eager to play a game off your external hard drive, you might think the Xbox is broke.

For more Xbox, be sure to check out how you can make your old Xbox gizmos work on the new, as well as how you can check your storage space.

READ MORE: Here’s The Xbox Series X Compared To My Mum’s Weird French Bulldog Tat

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