My Xbox says it has 1.3tb of free storage and I have an external hard drive but still makes...

Thank you for the suggestion (and the quick reply). Unfortunately, that is not the case—the Xbox itself has 180GB available of its allotted space, and the external drive has 1.3TB.

Hello Anonymous_375,

Thank you for posting in the Microsoft Community.

I can see that you are having trouble downloading games on your external hard drive. There are a few possible reasons why this might happen, such as:



- Your external hard drive is not formatted for Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S.

- Your external hard drive does not have enough free space to download the games.

- Your external hard drive is not connected properly to your console or has a faulty cable.

- Your console settings are not configured to download games to your external hard drive.



To troubleshoot this issue, please follow these steps:



1. Make sure your external hard drive is compatible with your console. You can check the compatibility requirements here: Troubleshoot external storage detection on Xbox | Xbox Support

2. Make sure your external hard drive is formatted for your console. You can format your external hard drive by following these instructions: Manage storage on your Xbox console | Xbox Support

3. Make sure your external hard drive has enough free space to download the games. You can check the available space and manage your storage by following these steps: Find your games and add-ons | Xbox Support

4. Make sure your external hard drive is connected properly to your console and has a working cable. You can test the connection by unplugging and plugging back the cable, or trying a different USB port on your console.

5. Make sure your console settings are set to download games to your external hard drive.

Please see: Game installation issues on PC | Xbox Support



If you have followed these steps and still cannot download games on your external hard drive, please contact us again and provide us with more details about the issue, such as:



- The model and capacity of your external hard drive.

- The error message or code you see when you try to download games.

- The games you are trying to download and their sizes.



We're looking forward to hearing from you. If there are any inquiries about our description or if there are any misconceptions, do reply to the post.

Just found this re: External HDD Storage:

You can still install arcade games, Games on Demand, and DLC (later than 2008) on the external and use it just fine. But it is still considered external storage and has limits on use, so does not replace the internal hard drive.

Games that say they require a hard drive will still require an internal hard drive to install, the external drive does not replace this requirement.

Xbox Originals (both digital and original Xbox discs), will also still require an official Microsoft internal hard drive to work, as those have the emulation partition necessary to run those supported games. Any external drive (or 4GB internal flash storage)
will not have that partition or emulation software to run original Xbox games (i.e. Backwards Compatibility).

Some older games released before any external storage was introduced on the 360 will only read DLC if it is installed on the internal hard drive. This is because when the software was written there was no external storage so as far as the game knows, external
storage does not exists. I believe this was around 2008, and I know Fallout 3 is one game that to which this applies.

Those are the only exceptions, everything else works fine using external storage. Like I said, Games on Demand (which includes the Games with Gold offerings), Live Arcade games, and most DLC can be stored and used from there. Also you can store your movies
and music there as well, and use them with no issues.

I have a problem with my external hard drive seagate barracuda, it was working about a month ago but now it shows all my storage but all my games on the hardrive have uninstalled and shows none of my games on the hard drive, I don’t know if this has anything to do with my damaged Xbox which was dropped a couple months ago but still works fine. If any one knows anything feel free to post ideas

Hi JeffStefanek,

I don’t think there is anything to fix as nothing has changed with hard drives and the requirements are exactly the same as before. Do check out this Troubleshoot
external storage detection on Xbox One support page and there is a list of requirements to use an external hard drive with the Xbox console.

I would suggest you show the official support page above to the retailer as evidence that hard drives are still supported with the Xbox One.

Hope this helps