The Western Digital My Book is a worthwhile purchase for anyone looking to install a large number of games on their Xbox One, allowing you to take full advantage of a whopping 3TB of storage.
Best Overall: Western Digital My Book
Not only are you investing in a quality storage brand in Western Digital, but the prices of the company's My Book line of external enclosures are incredibly competitive. Some purchasers have even found the drives contained within the products to be priced more as standalone units than when inside the My Book protective casing, so you know you're getting a solid deal for the Xbox One S or Xbox One X.
With games becoming more complex and sizes hitting insane amounts for downloads, it makes sense to pick up an external drive to offset some of the burdens, since the Xbox One S only comes with either 500GB, 1TB or 2TB of internal space, which simply isn't enough anymore. The Xbox One X suffers from similar storage constraints. Throw in a 4TB Western Digital My Book and you have up to 6TB of storage space.
The My Book is essentially a WD drive plugged into a daughter circuit board, which then runs via USB to the Xbox One S. That's pretty much it, aside from the protective plastic casing, of course. No thrills, no cool LED lighting, but when all you require the drive to do is spin up with the Xbox and store games, that's pretty much all you could ever need in an external drive.
WD offers the My Book series in 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 12TB and 16TB configurations. The latter two options are dual-drives, sporting larger cases with two drives inside. It all depends on how much you want to spend and how much capacity is required.
Best Alternative: Seagate Game Drive Hub 8TB
With a massive capacity of 8TB, this Seagate Game Drive is ideal for those who need to store a colossal library of Xbox One titles on their consoles but only wish to make use of a single drive. It's also designed to fit right in with the Xbox console itself. Seagate designed this hard drive specifically with the Xbox in mind so it will surely fit in with your controllers and the device itself.
This also has two front-facing USB ports which can act as a charger for your extra controllers. Also, the hard drive is a plug-and-play, so there's no set up required for this particular drive. However, this is not as fast as an SSD, so it may take some time to transfer data to the external drive.
Best Speed: Samsung 860 Pro
Samsung's PRO range of SSDs is incredibly fast considering they connect via slower SATA cables rather than hooking up through PCIe. This also makes them ideal for the Xbox One. All you need to do is purchase a small SSD enclosure to house this drive and manage the connection between it and your console, and you're good to go.
The software helps make this SSD a great option for external storage, and it pushes this above other SSDs you may find. This helps with the transfer speeds to keep them going at top speed. Also, it can be nice to have a smaller external hard drive so you don't take up much space next to your Xbox.
Bottom line
While you cannot go wrong when it comes to external hard drives, especially if you have a few units lying around and simply need to purchase an enclosure, we believe the best option for the Xbox One S and Xbox One X is the Western Digital My Book. Not only does it add an insane amount of storage to the console, but it also offers great reliability and portability.
With this external drive, it's possible to add up to 16TB of storage for your games. With console games getting larger over time, it's important to consider just how many you'll be able to save locally without having to deal with physical media, which is becoming obsolete.
Credits — The team that worked on this guide
Kennedy Maring is a freelancer who loves playing games, her little animal family along with her husband, and the great outdoors. Although she is a nerd through and through, she is looking to complete her cosmetology certificate in the next year.
