I'm trying to set up a new external SSD for my xbox series S, but when I plug it in it only...

if you're trying to play Xbox series games, they must be played from the internal SSD or the official expansion cards by seagate and WD. USB is not fast enough to play those games no matter what is inside the case

I'm not attempting to play any games from there. I'm simply trying to set up the external hard drive as external storage. That's when I received the error from my Xbox

Series S. it seems to be any game. I haven’t found one I can play directly from the hard drive yet. In honesty I haven’t tried many but seemed odd that I haven’t found any yet?

The only games that would be directly playable from an HDD would be Xbox one games.

Xbox Series X/S games can only be stored but not played from an external HDD. Those can only be played from either the internal ssd or one of the WD or Seagate expansion ssd's that plug into the back.

The reason is the Xbox Series X/S games are setup to take advantage of the speed of the internal ssd. For comparison Internal SSD has raw read speeds of 2.4 GB/s whereas HDDs would only be a max of 500 MB/s.

If he has a Series S/X and is trying to play a Series S/X optimized game, it will only run on the internal drive or on an expansion card made for the Series S/X. It won't run on a regular external hard drive or SSD.

No, just plug in the external hard drive, and your games that are stored on there will work straight away. There is no need to move them to the new console, only the Xbox Series X games have to be stored on the console or the external SSD storage that
is available for it too.

No, I used my 12tb western digital external hard drive but when tried to launch the game it said it needed to be on my internal ssd for faster speeds etc.

I even reached out to Xbox support on Twitter and they finally told me that I can only download the x/s version of the game if I'm playing on a Xbox series x/s.

So Microsoft/Xbox is aware that people aren't able to download the xbox one version on their series consoles when trying to play with their friends. I just don't think they care.