PSA: Increase your Xbox One storage space and decrease your load times with Western Digital external HDD

The Xbox One on its own, doesn't really offer a whole lot of storage space in this day and age. With games sometimes reaching up to 40 to 50 Gigabytes, players will run out of space quickly, forcing gamers to keep managing their storage by deciding which games to delete and which to keep. With the Xbox One June update, players finally had an alternative option to use external hard drives to manage their collection.

I received a tip to check out Western Digital's extremely portable external HDD for use with the Xbox One, and with them going up to 2 Terabytes, they seemed like the ideal solution to increasing my storage and allowing all of my games to be installed simultaneously. But there is actually one, much more important reason gamers would want to utilize an external HDD to manage their game collection, and that's loading speed.

After receiving the 2TB WD My Passport Slim, I went ahead and recorded the boot up times for titles through the internal Xbox One storage, and then once again when transfered over to the Passport. Some games showed a dramatic decrease while others only a slight one, but regardless of game tested, the load times were always better.

Loading up a level in Ryse until I was able to actually play took around 45 seconds with the Xbox One's internal HDD, as opposed to around 25 seconds with the Passport, shaving off an impressive 20 seconds. Likewise, Forza 5 took about 53 seconds with the internal HDD and shaved off over 30 seconds when it loaded in 22.

You can get some pretty good deals on Amazon for the Passport series, so if you're considering that, make sure to compare the prices so you're getting the best deal.

For those looking for an even higher capacity and perhaps more permanent solution to their Xbox One storage needs can also go with the less portable desktop harddrives such as the My Book or the Elements Desktop. The latter is going for just over a $100 for the 3TB solution, which easily gives you the biggest bang for your buck.