Safe to Run Games From External Drive Long Term?

Hi everyone,

Looking to pick up an X1 this holiday and I had a question about using an external drive with the X1.

If I use a portable external drive and set that as my primary storage, would it be safe to run the games off of the external drive? would extended or frequent gaming sessions wear the drive down prematurely?

would it be better to use the external drive as "backup" storage and run the games/apps that I'm currently using off of the internal drive?

the drive I'm looking at is this one:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-my-p...27&st=categoryid$pcmcat186100050005&cp=1&lp=5

I'm trying to decide if I should go with one of the 500gb bundles and buy a 2TB external drive. or just get the CoD 1TB bundle (even though I'm not a big fan of the design).

thanks!

:)

 

Harddrive questions

You can't disable the internal hard drive. Go ahead and attach an external hard drive and move all you games/apps/saves to it and run your games from the external drive.

 

turning off external hard drive

when in sleep mode external hard drive does not turn off.my question is, is it safe to unplug the hard drive when xbox one in sleep mode ?does this run the risk of damaging the drive or anything stored on it?

 

That is exactly the model external drive that I have (except mine is a 1TB). I have had it since we've had the option to use external drives and have had no issues whatsoever.

Go ahead and get it, use it as your primary storage and run your games off of it.

 

^^ hey, thanks!! that's great to hear.

just curious, but do you have the full 1TB of your external drive to use for storage? does the X1 take up a portion of the space?

 

Nope, it's the whole thing. But given time and new game releases you'll be thankful to have it.

 

^ oh, that's great to hear you have access to the full drive!!

I actually think I'm going to go with the CoD bundle for the 1TB internal drive. then, if I ever need more storage, I can get that 2TB external drive later on. the best of both worlds!

thanks for your help, onyx!!

 

oh, and a follow up question about this.

if I set an external drive as my primary storage, where do all of my local game saves get stored?

are my game saves stored on the external drive, too? or are they still saved on the internal drive?

 

All game saves are actually stored on the Cloud for easy access on any console.

 

FYI, just to clarify, you get the full storage space of an EXTERNAL drive, but if you got, for example, the CoD bundle with the 1TB internal hard drive, a portion of that WOULD be taken up with system files for the Xbox One's operating system. Just as an
example, on my launch console with a 500 GB hard drive, I had access to about 370 GB of space that wasn't used for system files.

On the external drive, though, the system files are still kept on the internal hard drive, so you wouldn't have any space taken up on your external!

Oh, and part of the system file space is reserved for game saves - so, it's saved in the cloud for easy access everywhere, but your game saves are also still local on the machine, too.

 

ah, thanks!

but aren't saves also stored locally on your hard drive?

 

Yes, definitely, that's actually part of the "Xbox One System Files" space, so it's basically the operating system, and the small savegame files that games create on the system, which are instantly backed up to the cloud.

 

thanks, Jaymo!!

so typically, how much space do Game Saves take up? are they relatively small?

so the 500GB ( or 370GB ) internal drive would offer plenty of space for game saves if I used an external as my main storage for the games and apps?

 

also, are there plans in a future update to let us back up our game saves to a USB stick or external drive?

guess I don't fully trust the Cloud and would prefer if we could create a local backup of game saves as well.

 

I'm not entirely positive about the moving of Save States to an external drive or USB stick, but that would be nice! I would say, yes, the 500 GB drive will be more than ample for your game saves since you're installing to an external drive - I think they
take up KB of space rather than MB, I think the biggest save game I've seen was around 240 KB. As for the backup, I completely understand the nervousness about losing saves in the cloud, and actually, what you mention is how it currently works - you have your
Cloud save, but you also have your local save, simultaneously. That way, if your network ever goes down, you will still have access to the save state directly on the console. Then, the next time you connect to the network and play the game, you will get a
prompt from live saying "The local save is more recent than the one stored in the cloud" and you will get to pick which save you want to use as your official one, at which point the cloud and console will sync up.

Hope this makes sense! I know with the advent of Cloud storage and Cloud processing, things have gotten a bit less cut-and-dried!