Getting mine soon, I’ve read open world games such as FH4 benefit the most from these faster Hard Drives. Curious if anyone playing on the X got one of these(or from another brand) and did you notice a nice improvement in load times and other aspects of the game? I’m hoping the car selection goes faster, sometimes it hangs for 1-2 seconds for me. I’ll be putting Forza 7 on it as well. Yes I know they are very expensive but I play this game a lot and I think for someone like me it will be a cool upgrade.
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When I moved the game to an SSD on my computer, I would say most loading operations, particularly changing car and fast traveling, became about twice as fast. I don’t remember that well, I had it on the disk drive for only a day or so before making space for it on the solidstate drive.
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I have an adata sd700 usb 3.0 ssd drive on the X one S. Very happy with it.
I don’t remember the exact timings but around 30s to the ‘press A’ prompt and again to the game starting which is noticeably faster.
Instant travel feels more instant, rather than staring at a loading screen and you can change cars a lot quicker in forzathon etc.
When I open my garage of 500+ cars, I no longer have issues with the wrong car image being shown when I scroll.
Loading screens are reduced so less dancing to watch.
For me it was worth the modest investment. Another reason for getting it was it was clear FH4 works the HDD hard as many open world games do so moving that load to flash makes sense.
I store my most played games on the drive with the rest on the internal hdd
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sounds awesome thanks can’t wait to try mine tonight!
With regards to an SSD on an XBOX - Its not “night and day” faster but it is faster. The drive is limited due to the USB 3.0 interface - so its not the same as putting the SSD in a PC. Don’t expect any twice as fast with the Xbox One of any flavor.
I have a Samsung 850 Pro with my One X - Some games save up to maybe 20% quicker load times, while others are not noticeably faster at all.
Without any actual measuring I would say FH4 is maybe 15% faster overall. Some aspects are more noticeable than others (Fast travel), garage loading properly (boy that was annoying on internal), etc…
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I just looked up some test data and found this:
So around 115MB/s for a mechanical HD via USB 3.0, vs 167MB/s for SSD via USB 3.0, 45% speed increase. Other factors will have an impact, but as far as the USB 3.0 interface goes, it can support that sort of speed increase.
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That’s a pretty lame review, but then Apple are pushing thunder bolt so you can’t expect USB to work properly on a Mac.
Here is a review of the external SDD I bought. It is limited to USB 3.0 by the connector, even so it manages ~ 430Mbps read and write. Adata Review
Also the Mechanical HDD has a couple more issues, you quote 115Mbps, however this is peak transfer on the outer tracks. The inner track is significantly shorter so depending on where it installs on the disk, actual rate is much lower. Seek time is also an issue on the HDD as the head has to physically move, random seek can be 12ms or more, and as the patches come the game is increasingly spread over the disk so the head has to move significant distance to read all the files. On SSD this takes nano seconds so any operation that reads lots of small files (like the garage) is much faster.
Anyway to move on from ‘Internet Expert’ discussion on other games and sources I’ll post some times.
It would be interesting to see what others get with HDD and with the other console configs.
Xbox one S 1440p 1GB (Hot wheels pack)
Adata SD700 256GB
FI is installed but my base is on the mainland so it starts there.
Logged in to profile in main menu and clicking on tile to launch => Press A to start 42s
Press A to start => Menu active 35s
Exit menu (second press of ‘b’) with trigger held => car start to move 10s
Press button with 3 lines, select a different car, from pressing ‘deliver car’ with trigger held => car starts moving 8s
Fast travel from the last button press and hold trigger => car starts moving 10s
Tried each of these a few times and got consistent results.
Lets see some other figures to save me coping the game back to the HDD to test!
AD
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That’s massively faster than my Xbox One X with the stock internal HDD. I have FH4 running in the 1080p/60 mode. I don’t have FI.
From clicking on tile to launch => Press A to start 61 seconds
Press A => home house appearing on screen (menu is a bit later but it put up a message about car pass, so I thought time to house appearing avoids variation due to that) 97 seconds
I’ll see what those improve to when the SSD arrives and the game is transferred to it.
The Xbox One does not take full advantage of the 45% theoretical increase though. There are multiple reviews / tests you can find:
It is heavily game dependent - it also depends on if you are using 4k textures or not. (4k is larger textures which uses larger files which causes a much needed boost on SSD vs Mechanical vs 1080p)
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Thanks. There’s a prospect of enough improvement that I’ve ordered a 500GB SSD to try via USB. I hadn’t really considered before that it might be worthwhile to use an SSD in this way. I’d thought about replacing the internal drive with an SSD, but the existing 1TB is almost full already, so I’d want a 2TB SSD if replacing the internal drive, and they’re expensive. But a 500GB external SSD is cheap enough for me to feel it’s worth a try for the games I’m mainly currently playing. I’ll record some footage before making the swap so I can compare some timings before and after.
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This thread peeked my interest and thought I could take the opportunity to ask a few questions regarding the SSD Drive.
I have an Xbox One X 1TB (although I’m using less than 50% of the drive space.)
- How big of a drive to you recommend? (storage capacity)
- Any specific make or model drive?
- Will the Xbox automatically move installed games to an external drive, or do you have to uninstall, reinstall?
- Any experience with drive life? (Longevity, I’ve heard some poor issues regarding this.)
- I’m not sure if anyone would have the answer to this but… If you have an external drive with games installed, could you move it to another Xbox and have the games work?
Any feedback would be welcome… Thanks!
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How many fast games do you need, I got 256GB as it was cheap and I wasn’t sure of the benefit, fits all my Forza games
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They are all limited by usb 3.0 on Xbox so any decent brand at lowest price
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You can move them in the storage menu
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SDD are pretty tough. Writing data causes wear, reading doesn’t… I have a 64GB SSD as system disk in my windows server 24/7 for last 5 years and it’s still ok.
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You can move the drive just fine, licences are linked to your profile and home xbox so others can play on you drive with their console only with your account or if they already own the content. Of course if you take the game with you it’s no longer on you home xbox for someone to play.
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Even so, I find it can take a long time to bring up my list of cars, and the resulting limited time to choose my car can be a problem. If it improves that, it will be useful.
I did a bit of searching and quickly found examples of widely varying performance, e.g. this is in German, but I think it’s saying one of the 3 enclosures is only giving around half the performance of the other two:
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One of the reasons I went for a capsule drive rather than a Caddy. The caddies are a bit of a lottery unless you buy a trusted brand.
For a large disk its way cheaper to buy a drive and caddy, or maybe you have a drive to repurpose. At the smaller end i.e. 256GB there is less in it. I got my drive for approx UKP50 in a pre black Friday deal. Currently around UKP56. A good caddy can cost 15-20
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When your car list is up, hit Y and A to filter to favorites, then X>Down>A to sort by class. This will compress the menu as much as possible and make it easier to choose your best car for the adventure.
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Thank you for the info… this is just what I was looking for.
Who plays FH4 Multiplayer anyways… 
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I have this on my X and also the S off kid, in both cases it is worth the money concerning FH3 & 4.
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hate to be debbie downer here but keep in mind that with multiplayer lobbies you’ll still be waiting on other players with slower drives and connections to load in… so your main benefit will be offline campaigns and solo player.
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i have XHD, still laggy and slow in the menus at times.
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is it worth switching everything over SSD, absolutely… if you got the cash, get the best drive available!!!
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