18TB WD external HDD not formatting for Games & Apps on Xbox One X

Well, took a shot and went to my local Best Buy and bought a WD 3tb external HDD and hooked it up, Xbox one found it and formatted it and moved my games and stuff over and everything is working perfectly so far.

Hi again, @Erich68CS!

I'm truly sorry to hear about your annoying issues with the formatting of the WD My Book external. Have you tried using the Storage settings on your Xbox One to format it for games & apps, after the Windows PC partitioning/formatting?

If it still isn't detected properly by your console, I'd recommend you to test the external HDD's health and SMART status using WD's Data LifeGuard Diagnostic on your PC. You should run both the quick and the extended test from the utility. Here's a link
to it:
products.wdc.com/.../kb.ashx

Be patient with the extended test, it could take some time for a 6 TB HDD.

Keep me posted with the results.

Some External HDD have different performance, for example I have a WD passport X and when the HDD it's over 50% usage have some issues with the games. (Don't load)

I researched this problem for 2 months to eventually discover an xbox software update caused some external drives to not be detected. Microsoft are aware of the problem and are supposedly fixing the problem soon.

The following solution worked for me:

Buy a WD My passport 5 TB external drive. WD Elements should be suitable also.

Download the WD quick formatter app.

Format the drive and select windows XP mode when prompted.

The quick formatter app formats the drive as a single partition, mbr, ntfs, 4k sectors and allows access to the full drive capacity on xbox one.

The media files are either MPEG-4 or MKV. I can confidently say that the issue is not due to file compatibility as I have many other files in those formats that play just fine.

This is the exact issue: I have an external HDD connected to my Xbox with all my media (movies mainly) files that I have saved throughout the years. When you initially connect an external HDD to the Xbox it asks if this is for storing Games/Screen Captures
or if this is for Media playback. In this case media playback is selected and then all the files currently on the HDD will show up and play without issue.

Now here is the issue. After the initial setup and selecting this HDD as media only, any additional files I add to my HDD the Microsoft Media Player as well as VLC will recognize the file/folder depending on how I have it formatted, but:

1) If the file is not in a folder both programs will recognize the file but will not play it

or

2) If the file is in a folder, then when I open the folder the folder is empty.

This is a new issue and has never happened in the past.

One potential temporary solution I thought of, but I don't know how to do it or if it is possible: Can I have the Xbox forget the external HDD (without clearing the HDD obviously) so as to the next time I plug it in it will recognize the external HDD as
a new drive and I can select Games vs Media again? This way after media is selected all my new files will show up as well.

Update: I restarted my Xbox and reselecting the Games vs Media did not work. When trying to play an individual file (of the new files just added, because all my previous files in the same format work just fine)

Update #2: The external HDD I am using is a WD 8TB Easy store. As I stated above all my old files work but none of the new files do. As my issue was not formatting, I dug out my old HDD (a 2TB Seagate) and added my new files to that. All the new files played
normally. The question is.... why are new files not playing on my WD while they play normally on the Seagate. (BTW: Yes both HDD are formatted the same, exFAT). At least for me this appears to be an external HDD issue. I will do one more update after clearing
my WD HDD before adding everything back, but this will take around 1 day.

Update #3: After erasing all media and adding it back to my WD external HDD all files (including the new ones) play as normal.