Nvme m.2 drive in caddy on Xbox series?

Posted 9th Jan 2023 (Posted 4 h, 16 m ago)

hi all,
trying to find a cheap solution to expand the storage on my son's Xbox Series S.

appreciate the best way is to drop £200 on a 1tb expansion card, but I could buy a second console for that!

I see nvme m.2 cards are around £30 for 512gb at the moment, and I can get a decent caddy for £20~ - so potentially £50~ all in for an external nvme SSD.

I know the Xbox won't run S/X optimised games from this over usb3.0 - but assuming the transfer to the internal HDD would be pretty quick? so can just juggle games on and off the drive easily?

my ultimate question, I read that these drives get pretty hot - would it be ok to leave the external nvme drive attached to the Xbox all the time?

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4 h, 11 m ago
If you are going to use external storage over USB3 and just transfer to and from the internal drive you may as well just use a standard SATA HDD and save some money. (edited)
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4 h, 10 m ago
He has one already, but transfer times are shockingly slow. 30 mins for 70gb game.
By which time he doesn't want to play it. (edited)
4 h, 9 m ago
In all honesty, just get a spinning drive. External hard drives are pretty cheap these days and since you’re relying on USB to transfer games back to the internal SSD anyways you’re not going to gain much from an external SSD vs a HDD.

If you’re copying an entire game it’s pretty sequential read/write so the speeds are already good. It’s only randomised for example playing back the game that you’ll notice much difference.

Xbox One games are optimised for spinning drives so will be fine and fairly fast to load from this external hard drive. And X/S titles simply won’t run without copying over anyway. So it seems like the best value option imo.
1 h, 38 m ago
HDD - best value, absolutely.

Depends on whether time matters to the user.

Copying external to internal:
EG. 7m46 (hdd) vs 2m19 (ssd)

Note that the more games you have, the more the difference will be (due to fragmentation impact on the HDD, SSD will be negligible) (edited)
1 h, 21 m ago
Think you'd have to buy one of the seagate plug in ssd cards to see any improvement in speed. But there expensive.