WD My Book seems lacking in performance

I read IGN's article (reference:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/11/the-best-xbox-one-external-hard-drive) on which would be the best external drive to get for this console since my 500gb filled up. I went out to Staples and grabbed a 4TB My Book (on sale as well), hooked it up to
the left port on the XB1, and started shifting some games over, thinking all would be fine, especially since according to IGN's article the external's R/W speeds are higher than that of the internal hard drives. It's to my understanding that this drive is
also a 7200rpm drive, which is higher than the internal drive's speed of 5400rpm.

However, of the few games I've played off the external drive, it seems like there's a lot more lag and framerate drops than if i were to play a game off the internal drive. I've tried played Forza Motorsport 6, Gears of War 2 (the 360 version), and Rise
of the Tomb Raider, all on both the internal and the external, and the internal always seems to favor. I'm using the USB cable that came with the My Book to hook up to the XB1. Am I the only one that's having this issue? I'd certainly hope that there's a fix
other than shifting my games back and forth between internal drive and external, would make playing a simple video game a much bigger hassle.

:)

 

External Hard drive not connecting

lastly, I have three WD programs installed on my PC from the first use with this. It is the WD Smartware, WD Security, and WD Utilities. WD Security does not recognize that the My Book is connected, WD utilities does, but when I check status it says Smart
Status Failed, and when I choose to erase disk it says too many bad passwords. in the WD smartware tool, it shows the My book but doesn't allow me to open My book or view the properties. Since I can see any options anywhere to re-format this I'm not sure
what else there is to do besides erase the disk.

 

WD My Book live

The 360 only recognizes FAT32 and HFS+ volumes. It does not support NTFS. Most Western Digital external drives these days come from the factory partitioned/formatted as one big NTFS partition.

The 360 itself can repartition/reformat a USB-connected HDD into one gigantic FAT32 volume (something Windows hasn't been able to do natively for a long time). Keep in mind that FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit. If you have videos over 4GB in size that you
want to play on the 360, this isn't a good option.

There's a pay-for program called HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software that enables full read/write/creation of HFS+ volumes under Windows. The advantage to HFS+ is that it supports files over 4GB in size. I believe the 10 day trial is fully functional, so
you could try it out before buying it. I could swear it had a different name in the past, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was.

 

I run all my games from an external HDD (Seagate 3TB) I don't have issues in doing this.

 

If you have not done so already I would suggest you carry out a full restart on the console to see if that may help with your issue. To restart the console go to the guide highlight setting and the restart option is there.

 

As in just restart the console as normal, or a hard reset?

I just swapped out the USB cable and am about to run through Gears 2 to see if it runs any smoother. I have one other cable to try if not.

 

Just a restart of the console. You can do this as I said above or you can also press and hold the power button on the console for about 10 seconds and once the power brick light has gone orange then restart the console.

 

Regular restart didn't really do anything. I'm going to try moving some stuff back to the internal, cut my losses on whatever game installs don't fit, and do a clean format of the drive. Maybe run a few tests on it on a computer to see if there's any performance
issues.

Also, with the first cable i switched to, the performance seemed to benefit a little, but overall it still was easy to bog out and lag a bit, especially during more intense moments of the game. I have another cable to try as well, which I will probably switch
to, as well as perform a hard reset on top of that to try and see if it helps before jumping through hoops to test the drive.

 

Hey there spadz45,

You should be able to run games perfectly fine from the 4TB WD My Book on your console. I would suggest connecting the drive to a PC and running WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic and see if the drive passes both the quick and the extended tests. Here's a link
to the tool:
products.wdc.com/.../kb.ashx

You can also run some benchmarks on the drive and see how it's performing in terms of speed. Reformatting or defragging the drive might help improve its performance.

.

 

Going to be running some diag tests on it later today, I moved a lot of stuff back onto the internal drive yesterday and then got caught up in running errands, so i'll resume my efforts in a few hours. Got the WD Diagnostic tool downloaded as well, i'll
run that and see what comes up.

 

Update: Got the drive connected to the WD Diagnostic tool, and am running a full-zero wipe on it. Since it's a massive 4TB drive, this is going to take some time more than likely, so I'll let it sit overnight and run further tests on it tomorrow, although
I can't imagine finding much wrong with a freshly formatted drive, especially if it's letting me run the format.

 

Do post back with the results from the quick and the extended tests. Formatting can help some problems but can't really fix any physical damage or defects on the drive which will otherwise show on the S.M.A.R.T. status checks.

Have in mind that the extended test also takes several hours to complete (depending on your system's specs and capacity of the drive).

.

 

Format finished successfully. Running a quick test on it now. Was going to run an extended test, but saw the 24 hour (yes, hour, and this is running over USB 3.0 as well) timer on it, and decided against donating my laptop away for another 24 hours for a
test, as I need it for other things. After this, I'm going to toss the drive back onto the XB1 and let it re-format it appropriately, and start moving my stuff back to test the drive out.

 

Installs seem to be moving quicker, haven't done a gameplay test yet. Still in the process of moving all of my stuff back over. If the issue still remains, then I guess I'll just have to suck it up and move stuff back over to the internal drive whenever
I want to play a game that's sitting on my external rather than my internal.

 

Played some Gears of War 2 on it, and unfortunately it seems like the lag is still there. I'm just going to chalk this up to the fact that I'm running a game through a cable instead of the internal hard drive, and deal with it. Maybe i'll try either an SSD
hooked up to a drive enclosure/dock or a different 7200rpm drive and see what happens, as I have both laying around for me to try. If i do either, I'll update here