My Series X no longer recognises my Samsung T5 external SSD for media. Help!

Good news !

There is a new Xbox update available now, that should fix this problem. 🎉

Thank you mjmcss for creating this thread for all the players with this problem (me too).

I am suddenly having this exact problem with multiple external hard disc drives used only for media file playback, but only SINCE the most recent update (my Xbox Series X was updated 25/09/2021).

The drives are from Seagate, and from WD, USB 3.0, and all working fine on a Windows 10 laptop, all are formatted NTFS, and the sizes are two 4TB drives, and one 5TB drive (Seagate).

The drives are recognised, I get the standard 'Use this as a media drive or for Xbox storage' Xbox system question and after I answer 'Use for media' the drive just disappears.

Kodi cannot see it, VLC cannot see it and it isn't listed under System - Storage Devices either.

EDIT:

I tried a USB flash drive, formatted for NTFS, and that is recognised and works without any issues, so this isn't a USB port problem, it is an external hard disc drive problem.

i have the same problem i have 2 ssd t5 from 1 tb both they dont work only my hdd still works plz make a update bug fix for xbox

Yeah, trying to contact Microsoft has been such a pain in the ***. I called Samsung when I thought it was the drive that was broken, and they sent me a Return to Manufacturer envelope within two days - before other people started posting here, and on reddit, that they had exactly the same issue.

Across this and the reddit thread, there are at least 30+ people who have been affected. At first I thought it was just Samsung SSD owners, but people with Seagate Barracudas and Western Digital drives (and ones I can't remember) started popping up as well.

Unfortunately I tried factory reset and it had no effect, because, as you say, the console needs to be on the latest firmware in order to connect to Xbox Live Services.

Maybe not that many people use SSDs (a pretty expensive storage option) to watch/record media on their consoles? Many people have commented saying that storing games on SSDs still works after the August 23rd update, so perhaps that's what most Xbox Series X/S owners use them for.

Still, I don't think everyone that is experiencing this problem is jumping online to talk about it. Of the 30 odd people who have said 'this is happening to me to', I'd think a lot of people Googled solutions and gave up (like I was about to do), were told it was their hard drive that had crapped out (like I was told before other people started coming to this thread), or simply aren't posting about it.

I have no idea if it's affecting every Xbox console/SSD pairing, but the sample size suggests it's at least affecting a fair number of them.

They finally acknowledged the bug on the 1st of September and said:

Hey All,

Just wanted to reply here and let you know we've passed along this feedback to the developers and there should be a fix for the issue in an upcoming update.

Thanks for those who submitted feedback on the console, as that is essential in investigating issues like this.

Thanks!

So 'there should be a fix for the issue in an upcoming update' isn't exactly a promise to fix it, nor does it include a timeline. Really bloody frustrating.

I have the exact same problem with my Series X and an external SSD (Seagate One Touch 500GB). Impossible to use it to save my games on it, as I had been doing for 8 months!

I have tried with three different SSDs formatted on Mac or PC but nothing helps. As soon as I ask the console to assign the disk for media, I get the error message "Please try again. That did not work for some reason. (0x80070057)". And oddly, the disk does not have the name I gave it when formatting but the console shows it to me as "Seagate Expanssion SSD SCi disk" (???).

And sometimes my other external drive (Seagate 4TB but not SSD, which has almost all my non-SX-optimized games on it, won't mount and the console won't show me any of the games on it ... I have to either. unplug / re-plug, either turn off the console ... boring)

Definitely, the problem does not come from us (or our SSDs) but well from the last update of the console (August 22, 2021). I have already sent 20 reports via the App on the console. I hope that Microsoft will react quickly and that it is not a voluntary blocking in order to make us buy their SSD overpriced ...

I bought this Seagate SSD only for the purpose of recording my games and publishing them on my Youtube channel afterwards, in excellent quality since it was possible to record your games in 4k / 60fps! (because streaming with Twitch is a disaster on Xbox: limited to 1080p / 30fps when on PS5 we have 1080p / 60fps)

I hope this will resolve itself quickly ...

I'm not in the US, I'm in Europe (Belgium), so same problem here.