Things have changed since my hardcore gaming days. I call it “Before Kids”. With two kids to look after now, my gaming time has been significantly reduced to that couple of hours between completing my fatherly duties, and collapsing from exhaustion. The amount of times I’ve booted up my Xbox One since I’ve gotten it can be counted… well, it can be counted and that’s saying something.
And yet, it still didn’t take me long to fill up the standard 500GB hard drive inside the Xbox One. I can’t imagine how quickly the single-guy version of me would’ve filled it up, and how much time would be wasted deleting and reinstalling games to work around the 500GB limit.
Enter the Seagate Game Drive, with its marvellous 2TB of extra hard drive space. Coloured a nice Xboxy green and compact enough to sit on the Xbox One or slotted alongside it, the Game Drive really gives you a lot more game space without taking up much physical space.
While the PlayStation 4 requires some unscrewing and removing of covers to expand the hard drive space, all you have to do with this little guy is to plug it into a USB 3.0 port, which you can find on the left side of your Xbox One (there’s one there) or behind it (there are two there). As I keep my Xbox One in a little tuck-away space and can’t be bothered pulling it out and messing with the rear cables, I just conveniently plugged it into the port on the side.
Once plugged it, you can format it to either keep games, or keep media like music/photos/videos. A slight drawback is that you can’t format it to keep both games and videos at the same time, but since I only use my Xbox One for gaming, that’s not a big deal for me. You can always keep your hentai anime and your Nobuo Uematsu soundtracks on a separate external hard drive, if you really need to get your fix.
Speed-wise, I really didn’t notice that much of a difference between the internal hard drive and the Game Drive. Installing games felt about the same, as did running the games themselves. I’m sure if you’re mathematically inclined, you could work out the read/write speeds and the USB 3.0 data transfer speeds and come up with a 0.004% difference between internal/external data speeds, but I have two kids and ain’t nobody got time fo dat.
So there you have it! It gives you an extra 2TB of space, which is 400% more than your standard internal hard drive. It might not give you increased performance but the convenience is definitely worth it, whether you’re a casual or hardcore gamer.
The Seagate Game Drive for Xbox 2TB version retails for S$199, and you can find out more information at the official Seagate website. There’s also a 4TB version if you need even more storage space.
Drew used to be a professional videogame reviewer, then he took an adulthood arrow to the knee. Now he is a content strategist, helping brands tell their stories without resorting to overused videogame memes.
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