SD Drive Issue

could be the external drive that is the problem, plug into a pc or laptop to see if it picks it up, (DO NOT FORMAT IT). if it does not then seek help from the drive manufacturer.

Hello, My name is Jesse. I'm an Independent Advisor and a member of the Microsoft community and I'd love to assist you today.

First unplug the drive then try this;

I'll recommend you do a power cycle to clear the system cache

- Turn off your console by pressing the Xbox button on the front of the console for about 10 seconds, until it shuts down completely.

- Unplug the console's power cable. Wait 2 minutes.

- Plug the console power cable back in. Press the Xbox button on your console to turn it on and check if it's all good.

If that doesn't help, I'll suggest you try doing a factory reset keeping games and apps on your console. This will refresh the console and remove all potential bugs without deleting any game data.

- Press the Xbox button to open the guide.

- Select Profile & system > Settings > System > Console info.

- Select Reset console.

- Choose Keep Games and Apps

Once that is done, you'll need to sign into the console using your Microsoft account credentials. If the issue is with your console, that should fix it.

Another issue could be with any external hard drive / SSD / SD/ Micro SD. Always check any drives you have installed.

The only issues you might come across is loading/reading speeds.

I use a card reader with various sized SD and micro sd cards, some slow and some fast...so if you have a low speed card, it would take a little longer to load and save stuff , so try and look for some high speed sd cards or flash drives.

The likely issue is how Xbox Game Pass installs games with virtual drives (VXD's). The slower read/write speeds has nothing to do with it. If you're low on storage, I recommend an external hard drive, or for better performance, an external SSD.

Much of what ngocphi put here is factually incorrect.

While it's not as fast as a spinning hard drive you can actually play games from an SD on a PC, you just can't do it on PC Game Pass. Indeed the Steam Deck handheld PC easily runs games from an SD. It's not as fast as a hard drive, but surprisingly it's not that slow either. Once you've installed a game to SD card, you won't be constantly writing to the drive. While it's true that flash media can only be written to a finite amount of times, SD-Cards do not wear out when just reading data.

The Nintendo Switch and the newly released Valve Steam Deck can run games directly from Micro-SD cards absolutely fine.