It appears obvious that seagate has some exclusivity contract with Microsoft for these drives. If that were to end, I am sure we would start seeing much less expensive options. There is no reason for them to lower the price since they have no competition.
@@ralphtaylor7448 Sad truth is if you buy an Xbox series S and storage expansion card. Your better off buying Xbox series x because they are the same price at that point.
@@ShinyMooTank at least you got the small form factor going for you. If you're a kid and tell your mom to buy a console you better tell xbox, otherwise she will buy the ps5 digital version which is just a scam. If you have an S and a X it's great if you have a ps5 digital and a physical it's pointless
@@yol_n I have already made the switch to digital only for Xbox and pc(except for cyberpunk because gamestop was selling brand new ones for $5). Nintendo is still physical only for me. They can't commit to having backwards compatibility or keep their own shops online. I wonder if Sony did the digital version and physical version just to test the waters if they could get away with PS6 being all digital if it made the console cheaper. Xbox was smart with the series S because there was no competition for that price point besides Nintendo and with Game pass they could easily get away with not having a disc drive since backwards compatibility is all the way to the Orginal Xbox.
If you set up your USB (HDD or SSD) drive as the default storage device, it'll automatically install USB-drive-compatible games to it. Works for me with the listed games.
@TokyoFool you're a knob head. In the video he mentions how you can find out what games will install to an external device, so it can be of use and it is related to the subject. You start installing a Series enhanced game and if it can be installed to the external drive, it will be automatically, saving researching into it.
@Folurby yes it is. With external drive set to default download location even series x/s games automatically go to usb drive unless they actually need internal, in which case you get a pop up informing you that it needs internal storage and giving options to switch or continue.
i didn't know the price was still so bad for the storage expansion. i helped my stepdad recently upgrade my sister's ps5 with a m.2 drive and he was shocked at the price difference between a storage upgrade for that and a Series console. proprietary storage expansion should not exist btw, i worked on Squadrons, glad to see you've enjoyed it!
Kind of a shame that this happen. Seems like Seagate doesn't want to let go of their tech to the competition otherwise they will not have the unfair advantage anymore. Which is a shame since it does work. Kind of like a soupedup game cartridge or SD Cards for modern consoles.
@Deliveredmean42T hat's not the issue. The issue is the exclusivity contract that they have with Microsoft on who gets to make these useless, overly expensive expansion drives for the SERIES consoles. The tech itself isn't anything special or unique to Seagate. This is a greed based money grab by both companies, which is why these expansion drives are proprietary. No one should be buying these drives.
@@RaenYrtham Well the problem is not the sales, the problem is that they dont have a permanent price drop. These things are 3 years old at this point, so you expect these to be cheaper, no?
This was inevitably going to be a problem for Xbox at some point. While I do appreciate the advantages of a portable expansion card. They need to keep the price more in line with the market.
I knew proprietary storage would be an issue down the line but remember the ridiculous situation with PlayStation for like a year or so after launch where they had no expansion option - Microsoft offered it from the start but I had hoped that it would have tried to keep prices within range of m.2 drives over time.
Most of these games are older games that received patches to run enhanced on the series consoles but don't take full advantage of the new architecture. For me I set the default installation location on external harddrive, if the game requires ssd it will tell you before downloading.
In a recent Xbox update there's now an option (shown in MVG's video) to specify where to install backward compatible games and where to install Series X/S only games - with this set correctly you can have it install games that require internal storage to install to it without prompting for each download and still have backward compatible games install on external storage by default.
If that happens it'll mean companies will have the control of your licenses. Meaning you're not really buying it, you're renting it. Now, we already are, but it will get exponentially worse.
It's a hardware limitation issue, the external hard drives via usb port don't have enough speed, even if it's an ssd due to the limitations of not having usb-c or thunderbolt ports
@mr.riposte2280 Exactly, and unless you still have access to that account, you're ass out. On top of that, it's been proven that we're effectively renting access to our purchases. I'm just done with digital purchases other than content. Yes, I know it applies to content as well. Most don't sell physical copies of extra content anymore, though.
When I remember correctly: The patched versions of Assassins Creed Origins and Odyssey are also called X|S title but can be run from an external drive.
yeah basicly non series games that got graphical updates like reoslution or fps increase can run on external usb ssd. Reason is they werent patched with the specific need for super fast reading speeds that series native games have been developed with.
@visker81 Even then, it's very rare for a game to NEED super-fast loading times. Usually it's a matter of wanting them. Ironically, Sea of Thieves DOES need them. Try playing that game on a SATA II hard drive, see how fast you get sunk.
Ditto. I’ve been running Halo: MCC, State of Decay 2, and others of a bog-standard external SSD. For a while Sea of Thieves could too after its X|S update. A later update removed that possibility, however.
@@ScrapKing73 are you certain mate? I’m still running Sea of Thieves from an external SSD on my series X 🤷♂️ Edit to add: just double checked and still fully working, installed on an external SSD so you can still do it.
MS had a missed opportunity when designing the series S & X to add faster USB ports, Sony has them on the PS5, including type C. The Xbox does a speed test on portable drives to make sure they are fast enough to play xbox games, they should of just added another level to the speed test that enables series S/X game installs.
Type-C is just a connector, not a bus speed standard. Both consoles use the same USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 ports, which top out at 5gbps, or 500MB/s in the real world. Basically enough to max out a SATA SSD, but still roughly 4-5x slower than the internal drives. Moving to USB 3.2 10gbps or 20gbps would have made a big difference. Still slower than the internal drive, but more than enough for most games.
Yes, I have been running many Xbox One enhanced games from an external 2 TB SSD that I bought back in December 2020 with my Xbox Series X after finding out that these Gen9Aware games don't have to run from the internal storage. This includes the Halo Master Chief Collection which is over 100 GB, I think. I use the internal storage and 2 TB expansion for native Xbox Series games. The same is also true for the PS5 which can also run enhanced PS4 games from external storage. I have a 4 TB Crucial X6 SSD for all my PS4 games. It's only native apps that need to run from the internal drives on both systems. Still, I wish that we had more flexibility of where to install native PS5 and Xbox Series X games because I am pretty sure that games like FIFA 23 and NBA 2K23 don't need to run from an internal SSD as I can install those games to an external SATA3 SSD on my PC and the loading times are actually as quick and sometimes quicker than the native versions on my PS5. Having this option would mean that the internal and expansion NVMe storage could be reserved for those games that DO need the faster storage.
I just copy them from External to Internal, then when I am done with them…I delete em and copy some more other Games I know wanna play within the coming weekends. 😅 It’s only when they receive Updates that I update the Internal Version, delete the Outdate External Version and move or copy the Updated Internal Game back onto External when I am done playing em.
I agree with you 100%, the price of the storage is way too expensive and not allowing any other companies to make them so Seagate have the monopoly is very anti consumer
I think the other part of it is that hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of these proprietary expansion cards have already been produced that need to be sold in order to make their profit off of them. Knowing microsoft, there's absolutely no chance that they'd ever discount these cards or allow another manufacturer to produce something similar for cheaper otherwise they'd be taking an absolute massive loss in profit. It simply wouldn't make sense from a buisness standpoint. So yeah, it is anti-consumer. They should have done what Sony did and just use the standard M.2 slot but Microsoft has always been stifflers about their storage. With Xbox 360, they used conventional 2.5" hard drives BUT, they only allowed certain manufacturers and specific models to produce them. If you try to insert any 2.5" hard drive of any kind other than what they made, it won't recognize the drive inserted. The reason they do this is to minimize the chance of exploitation of the console (custom firmware, mods, piracy, ect.) Although it didn't matter as people did find ways to exploit the 360. However with the xbox one, they didn't implement the same security. You can use any 2.5" hard drive or ssd. Not officially anyway, but there is a software on windows someone made that creates and formats the xbox one filesystem to the 2.5" drive you want to install. I personally did this, I installed a 2TB ssd in my xbox one and it works waaaay faster than any hard drive microsoft put in their consoles. It still violates their terms of service, but to my knowledge nobody has been banned for doing this. I don't think it's detectable by their live service. Honestly I don't know why they care, because again to my knowledge, there's no one out there that has installed custom firmware of any kind to the xbox one. I could be wrong, but there's nothing mainstream like there was with 360. So for them to be so worried about exploitation with storage devices is just stupid. They need to do what Sony has already done with the PS5 but I don't see it happening with this generation.
Agree, but Storage expansion card isn't fully proprietary. It's just a CFexpress 1.0 Type-B form-factor with an additional security chip to lock out specific drive types. You could make your own if you find the right drive or firmware for the drive.
@@M_CFV it was obsolete the moment it launched, smartphones were already doing similar and in case of flagship phones beter graphics quality and resolution. That was also at the time where publishers were trying to bring actual games to mobile before switching over to games with a name of a franchise just to get more money on microtransactions. Mobile hardware was evolving at an alarming rate back then, so no, not a massive reason, but definitely part of the reason.
@@Rab1dGAMER no, they did not, the ps vita released on 2011, smart phones of the time were the galaxy s2, htc sensation (i used to have one) and the iphone 4s, the ps vita had a better gpu than the iphone 4s (SGX543MP4+, while the iphone had a respectable MP2, that is the core configuration), the ps vita had a similar cpu but a much more powerful gpu with dedicated VRAM (both had 512mb of ram but the vita had 128mb of vram), so no, the ps vita was not obsolete, the main issue was the price and the business model, proprietary memory and a propietary charger (people often forget that the first version of the vita had a proprietary charger) scared away gamers and the 250usd price tag scared away the casual cosumer that could either buy an iphone for 200usd maybe less with a better carrier plan and play candy crush or buy a freshly price dropped 3ds (from 250usd to 170usd) and play mario kart and mario 3d land, sony endded up pinning them self into a wall with greedy bad decisions and using expensive hardware for the time that didn't allow them to price drop on time, 250 usd for a dedicated gaming device was a hard pill to swallow back in 2011.
I've known about this since early 2021 and I've tried to let as many people know about it as I can on Twitter. Glad you're bringing light to this. One thing I noticed was the X/S games that do work on the Series consoles are mostly the smart delivered games from last generation.
I've been running Mass Effect Legendary Edition on an external USB drive on my Series X since the game released, as well as a few other "Series X/S optimised" games. Durango Gen9 Aware titles are just Xbox One games compiled with the Xbox One SDK but have a little bit of extra code that allow them to detect when they're running on a Series X/S, hence Gen9 Aware. They can use that knowledge to make changes in how they behave on the faster hardware - typically graphical settings like removing a 30fps cap, adding extra video modes like performance/quality etc that don't appear when run on an XBox One. But it's still an Xbox One game running in backward compatibility mode. It gets some benefit from the raw increase in processing power but can't use any of the new features like ray tracing, velocity engine, etc, the latter being why it is allowed to run on an external drive. Many cross gen games were Gen9 Aware before Microsoft even added the "Series X/S optimised" overlay on game icons in the store and game library, and you've always been able to check the file info to see this as demonstrated in the video. Where things got confusing is when Microsoft added that "Series X/S optimised" logo on our games - and decided to use the same "optimised" logo for both Gen9 Aware titles - which could run on an external drive - and true next gen titles compiled with the GDK, which can't. They really should have called it "Series X/S enhanced" for these half way titles and reserved "Series X/S optimised" for games compiled with the GDK for Scarlett hardware IMHO, this would have avoided the confusion. Many games have changed from backward compatible Durango Gen9 Aware titles to GDK Scarlett titles with an update - three I can think of off the top of my head are Doom 2016, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order and The Witcher 3 - all of these updates added raytracing modes and thus required a new GDK build of the game that is not backward compatible to access the raytracing features. All of these I had installed on an external drive prior to the updates, when the updates came out the Xbox slipstreaming automatically downloaded and installed the entire new build of the game onto my internal storage without asking, filling the drive, and left the old Durango Gen9 Aware versions on the external drive which I had to manually delete! So having these Gen9 Aware titles on an external drive is nice but does risk them getting automatically installed onto internal storage in the future if the developer ever updates them to be a proper next gen build.... I share MVG's disappointment with the price of the official nvme modules - my Series X is now a bit over 2 years old and I checked just a few days ago to see what the price of the 1TB official storage addon is now and it's still the same as ever - way too expensive.
so here is the funny part about all this 'expansion' situation. WD is who supplies MS with the internal SSD for the Series line. And they were granted a license to release their own expansion cards but for some reason they just have not done that. They were said to have sizes ranging from 256gb (yeah smaller than internal SS storage) up to 4tb. Seagate only recently offered other sizes like 512gb and 2tb and Im not sure when their contract is up but I hope soon. More makers releasing licensed cards is better for consumers.
Or Microsoft can just remove the stupid firmware lock on the expansion port so that passive adapters can work with any pcie 4.0 drive. That would be better for consumers.
The reddit thread covers pretty much every title to date, except maybe Far Cry 5, which has now native next gen 60 fps patch and it's using this exact approach - it's Gen9Aware and could be ran from external SSD/HDD no problem.
Oddly, my farcry 5 has the "left & right" arrows that indicates that it needs to be moved to internal storage before it can be played. But does in fact play from external storage.
I found out about this in 2020, kinda surprised you hadnt heard about it until recently, since your channel is probably the most technical one I follow lol.
@@wolveric0 Sony did it with the PS2, PS3, and PS4, but not the PS5. The PS5's internal drive is integrated into the motherboard and effectively not user replaceable. Though the PS5 does have an M.2 expansion slot for an additional SSD, so at least expansion storage is not proprietary.
I was quite surprised when my Xbox 360 and Xbox One games on a external HHD also has the quick resume function, I thought this was only available for games on the SSD.
I noticed this as well when I was transferring some games and didn’t get the warning it wouldn’t play on my WD Black spinner. Makes sense since some of these games are quite small and/or don’t require much storage throughput to run.
A good way to take advantage of this is to set your external drive as the primary install location. Then you will get a warning if the game has to be installed to internal storage when you go to download it instead of having to manually check afterwards.
The latest Witcher 3 Raytracing Update is marked as Generation Scarlett but runs fine from my USB 3.1 SSD. Maybe the Publisher can define where the Game has to run. On the other Hand, Forza Horizon 4 is only updated, because I played it on my original XBox but now on the Series X it got a update and have to be placed on the internal SSD
I have seen CF express to M.2 nvme adapters are out in the wild but it seems they don't work anymore, I would love the homebrew community to come up with a way to use these reliably if that is even possible
The newer X/S enhanced games that can still be played from the exernal - AC Odyssey and Origins, Far Cry 5, Sniper Elite 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider... those just off the top of my head.
The linked reddit post is old and not being updated. Best to just check for yourself by going to manage game and then to file info to see if it's gen9 or just gen9aware.
Great tip! I was able to move MCC over to my HDD and free up 120gb on my internal. Also, Seagate isn't the issue, it's MS. Remember the 360? Until we unlocked the partitioning for the HDD, we were stuck with their proprietary storage options too. They just love to keep hardware locked down.
Ehh... did that ever get solved w/o having to run hacked FW? I have an official drive that I bought second-hand, and ran a read/write test on, blanking all the media, before it ever even occurred to me that the 360 would be looking for some secret handshake on-disk. It is now a very glossy USB storage drive, since that's all I can use it for anymore. Does something exist that will resuscitate it? I tried cloning another valid drive, which, of course, did not work...
@@nickwallette6201 You used to be able to find a utility, it was an exe that used a .bin for whatever size drive you had. You'd run the exe, and it'd flash the HDD (connected through USB to SATA or USB to proprietary 360 HDD connection) and it'd partition the drive perfectly for the 360 to recognize it. But it'd work on a non modded 360, the 360 would then see it as a standard OEM HDD
@@jakebonnett1675 That would be nice! I've never quite gotten over the sinking feeling I got when I realized I had just burned that drive. Not that I can't just replace it... I dunno. It just bothers me. haha
Thanks for the Video MVG. It's great to let everyone know about these findings. Unlike me who purchased 2 1TB and 1 2TB Seagate Drives. This will help everyone a lot
Even with the 1TB of internal storage on the Series X it still fills up too fast. I expected by this point Seagate would no longer have the exclusivity but as time goes on it seems like they're going to remain the only partner. I might go the rout of a CF express adapter but haven't really looked into if there's performance losses or not. I feel like they might not be using all the PCI lanes on some of those adapters.
Assassins creed origins Desperados III Farcry 5 Skyrim Halo MCC Mass effect trilogy Shadow of the tomb raider State of decay 2 Ghost recon breakpoint. And more can all be ran from external storage. If you don't want to check the file info you can simply move your games to an external drive, then filter on external drive and series x, if a game doesn't have the "left & right" arrows in the bottom right of game tile it can be played from external storage
I have been running around saying this since I got my Series S in 2021 and connected an external SSD to it. Glad you're covering it and giving it more exposure because I always grab my head when I see people forking out the big bucks for Microsoft's expensive Seagate Expansion.
I noticed that long ago, that some labelled Xbox Series games can run on a slower drive. However it does seem like only games that have received a 60fps patch with their Series label work on slower drives (AC Origins / Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider...). In these, apparantly, no further Series optimizations were made. They got the Series label while not technically being true Series versions. Ori being the exception.
One thing that thoroughly annoyed me was when Forza Horizon 4 got an update that made it go from something that ran just fine on external storage to requiring running from internal. And there was no way to refuse the update or force it to use the Xbox One version, as far as I could tell.
If the Xbox platform wasn't a DRM hell box, I would upgrade to a Series X. But having no internet and being blocked from games I paid for is absolutely ridiculous*. However, this is cool news to hear*. This was another reason why I haven't moved on from Xbox one x due to the storage options. On my One X, I have 5TB total and I never needed to worry about space. But man, it's a real pain to have to delete and reinstall games like crazy. Really looking forward to them HOPEFULLY fixing this in time.... Or just Go PC and PS5. Lol
But you can play your 5TB of Xbox One X games from the same external drives connected to your Series X... 🤦♂ The only ones you can't play are native Series X games of which there aren't many yet due to how long the crossgen support is dragging on.
@@Lockieez that is the point of the problem. The point I was making is how simple it is for the Xbox one X to expand storage over how annoying it is for the Series consoles. The method I used wouldn't be effective for current gen games and I'd have to get lucky rather than have a sure fire way to solve the issue. If I can't use my current 4TB external hard drive to play ALL games then that's the problem. Didn't think that Id have to break that down. But whatever. If
Just like with playstation, if you aren't game sharing with somebody and have your main console you use marked as your primary one, you can play all your games offline forever without having to refresh licenses
@@M_CFV yeah, I set up all of that as it should be and I'm still locked out of some of my Digital games. Trust me, I tried. If when you attempt to boot up any game on Xbox one and up says " getting your game ready " it's checking for an Internet connection. If there isn't one, it's blocking you. Due to my budget I can't afford internet outside of my very slow hotspot. I can play games online just enough but as soon as a patch is needed, I'm fucked. Lol it takes me a week just to download 300mb. Like it's not reliable for gaming. And just to clarify, these are games that I fully paid for. From digital Xbox to Xbox one games. It's swing and miss and if that message pops up, you can't play without internet. On my PS4, I never ran into issues playing ANYTHING offline. Digital and physical games.same with switch. Unless it was a PlayStation plus or switch online game/DLC, you know, the obvious things that won't work without internet they outperform the Xbox platform when it comes to that. Trust me. I have tried everything for the Xbox. And since they want to push game pass so hard, they don't want you to have any ownership of your copies and want to control what you play on their platform. The ONLY thing that can save Xbox for me is if Perfect Dark will be any good. But there are rumors that it will be a live service. And if that's so... Peace Xbox. Lol it was fun On another note
Another quality MVG video with interesting information. I wonder though, what's behind the blurred out section? What sort of secrets has MVG got going on!
That's good news! Great to save internal storage space for Series S/X only games while putting all Xbox One stuff in a cheaper external drive. Just be aware that the bottleneck speed in loading games, even on an SSD, is the USB port so that's why MS made a "proprietary" port which hooks directly to the mother board for speed.
Microsoft does the same thing with audio devices. I work in product development for a gaming peripherals brand, and in order for USB audio devices to work with Xbox One or Series S|X, they need an (expensive) Microsoft "security" chip. Their compatibility testing was a joke years ago too. They would miss issues one round of testing and then catch them another, so they clearly were not following much of a test plan. I found a bug that they tried to blame our product for, and then took years to fix it. On Xbox One several years ago, if you were in a game chat (not party chat), and then disconnected and reconnected your audio device (if it used a dongle, reconnect the dongle, if it paired directly to the console, power-cycle the headset), game/chat balance controls (which are required by Microsoft) would stop working correctly. The control of chat volume would be stuck at 100%, while game volume adjustments continued to function correctly. I ran into this during testing, assumed we had a firmware bug, and then realized that it was actually an Xbox issue.
Someone needs to figure out a way to make your own Expansion Card. Perhaps they can figure out what makes the WD or Seagate expansions work with the series x, and use that same partition structure/handshake code to essentially emulate the seagate or wd cards to create our own 8TB expansion cards.
They same games are played on pc with many users still only using Sata 3 SSD which are about 5x slower compared to what’s inside the series x. Anyway if it’s possible to play them games on pc with sata SSD then it should entirely be possible for games to be played on Xbox via External sata 3 ssd as you are able to pick up 6tb even 8th external drives quite easily theys days.
That is interesting, even though it would make sense that Xbox One games would be able to run from USB, I didn't realize that Microsoft were implying that they wouldn't work. I guess they wanted to mask the differences between Gen9 aware executable and native Gen 9 ones to make it more consistent for users. I 100% agree that both Microsoft and Sony should allow developers to opt out of the NVMe requirement for native Gen 9 games that won't necessarily take advantage of the tech. It would be a big win for the end user. (Small nitpick, M.2 is a _physical_ form factor. What Xbox memory cards do have in common with the M.2 drives you'd use in a PS5 is that they use the NVMe protocol.)
One thing to note is another of these games do offer cloud gaming so there's no need to install if you've got a solid internet connection, this does help big time on storage
I will never understand why they FORCE you to download the Series X/S versions of games instead of installing last gen versions to play off of hard drives, i wanted to install the assassins creed games but they’re too big for my Series X internal storage so i tried to install the last gen version but it didn’t let me for some reason
The reason is easy to understand, MS is loosing money on the sell of Xbox Series they want to offset their losses with the purchase of Seagate memory card.
@@Therealgamer-fb7jw Yes some games, work the same as the new generation and I play them on my One S, for instance Far Cry 6 and AC Valhalla you gain almost 270 gigs on your Series X, ofc not the same quality; but as newer games are coming without being compatible with old gen I have plenty of room for them.
That Reddit thread is how I found out about this tip. Due to the insane prices of the expansion drives, my Series X hasn't been touched in months and have been putting more time into the PS5 and Steam Deck, thanks to the prices of 2TB 2280s and 1TB 2230s dropping.
I can confirm this. I had a old 10 TB Seagate external HDD from last gen. I noticed that some game forced me to install to the internal but games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead 2 would run just fine off the external
I think x/s version would be also for the Xbox one x and Xbox one S and then if it also says optimized for series x and series S are the one that can't be played on external :(
I was aware that various games could be played from external storage, but that has been via trial-and-error. Thanks for this tip in looking at the file info for verification.
It's because of Gen9Aware games that I preferred the old way to manage storage. Before you could set the external as the default installation location for games and would be prompted for any GDK games to install internally while gen9aware would install and play just fine. Now I need to micromanage the games to best make use of my storage
I have an idea. If someone could compare these XS optimised games if they were installed on PC with similar specs but installed on Sata drive that would give a good estimate how it would run on XSX external drive. I wonder how it would go.
Some other optimized games that run from USB (tested myself): - AC Odyssey - Far Cry 5 - Sniper Elite 4 - Skyrim - Rocket League What I do is I use USB as default installation path for all games. If a game needs internal storage, it pops a message at the start of installation warning you of that and giving the option of installing it to internal storage instead. If the game can be run from USB, this message isn't shown, be it the game optimized or not.
Another simple way to see if a game is Gen9Aware : when managing it, if it has the "Compatibility options" submenu it's either a backward compatible game or a Gen9Aware game. Series X|S games do not have the "Compatibility options" submenu.
I found this out by accident. I reinstalled Halo MCC in it's entirety as it automatically chose my external drive and didn't give me the "please install to internal" message. I was wondering why my internal space wasn't eaten up because it usually sits around 70-80%
A little update on this, apparently now, if you see a little transfer icon. Then it has to be put on. I believe the internal. But if it doesn't have the little transfer icon, you can play it off external even if it has the symbol of optimized, I can't even play some off my external HHD according to this.
This is my biggest complaint on the Series S & Series X. I have an 8TB external HHD on my Xbox S with almost 200 titles on it. Some have enhanced versions for the Series S or Series X. I have yet to setup my Series X console for this reason alone. It should be up to the console owner if we want to live with slower load times to use external USB storage. I'm not about to shell out $200 on an SSD storage card. These should only cost a few dollars more than an SSD of equal size. Hopefully there will be more makers for the aftermarket cards that are not out to rape us on price. Thanks for the video. The info and list is very welcoming.
I think the games that have the arrows icon are ones that will only run on the internal storage or an expansion card. But one thing I do is by default install everything to my external hard drive and move them to my internal when i'm going to play it. I'm one that doesn't play many different games in a short period of time so moving a game to the internal isn't a huge deal for me.
Reminds me of players installing mods for Knights of The Old Republic on their original xBoxes...I wonder if this could be used for installing new apps and whatnot, for development purposes?
When the Series consols came out i got the S right away and over time did notice Xbox One game or you refure to them as XDK games where being optimised for the Series console and once they where you where forced to move them to you internal drive and for me having the Series S that want a choice so I did ramble about it on Twitter and or Reddit and a number of people either had the Series X or a Xbox one so they didn't have much of an issue due to the X having way moori storage the Xbox One not having the capability. i did ramble about the issue because Xbox said the games have to be on the internal drive so it doesn't cause issues for other people in multiplayer games but the Series Optimisation was also happening to games that didn't have multiplayer so after my complaints they let you put them on the external drive but it was a wile later until they did it and I'm surprised Xbox hasn't done something to show you can. my best guess to why they haven't made it more clear is for getting more sales for the Expantion cards.
I’m glad there’s some optimized Series S games that can work on USB external storage, but I still hate the Series S for having such a bare bones storage space, especially when it lacks an optical drive, my Xbox One S is still more useful than the Series S because it has 4K blu ray drive!
@Modern Vintage Gamer there were some significant sales (at least here in the US) for the 1 and 2 terabyte expansion cards during the last 2 months of 2022. In regard to the games you mentioned optimized for Series S/X that can be stored and run from a usb hard drive, are you sure they’re running with Series S/X optimizations and not Xbox One X optimizations? I’d be curious to know for certain wether or not these games run more optimized off the NVMe or perform the same off a usb hard drive. Thanks
I noticed this with the Master Chief collection and Sea of thieves about a year ago. I think Shadow of the tomb raider also works off usb storage as well.
You are a life saver - I was getting really pissed off having to manage my downloads, especially when coming across games that are why larger than you think they would be - just two examples being Persona 4 & 5. Playground Games really need to sort out the optimisation for Forza 4 & 5 too
Microsoft is the majority shareholder for Seagate, through the vanguard group, so no surprise the price has remained fixed.china also benefits as another large shareholder. Anyone surprised?
Nice video. I still use an external hard drive and play older games off that. Move newer stuff there if I need the room. It would be nice to expand if your playing say lots of CODs and Battlefields here and there but it’s not a must.
It was widely known, bro. Seen some reddit topics on that also;) My first game that I could run from USB HDD was the AC Origins after the patch, if I remember correctly.
Looked through the stuff I had downloaded and found another. Goldeneye 007 is marked as a Series X|S title but when looking at the file info, it's not an XboxGen9Aware game but just an XboxOne game. It should work but I'll have to test later when I'm off work
I've noticed this since before Christmas for the Xbox series X games I have that's working on the game drive is conon exiles and state of decay 2 and crypt of the sepent king
On the PS5, PS4 games are just labeled as PS4 whether or not they were enhanced for the PS5. On Xbox, they’ll call anything an X:S game even if it’s an Xbox one game with enhancements.
This just adds to the confusion. What exactly is it that make a game require the internal or official expansion? MS needs to release an exhaustive list on what does and doesn't need it.
Microsoft should have just made the series s to come with a minimum of a 1tb out the box . 500gb is nothing these days. Just forcing the consumer to buy their proprietary storage to make money .
It appears obvious that seagate has some exclusivity contract with Microsoft for these drives. If that were to end, I am sure we would start seeing much less expensive options. There is no reason for them to lower the price since they have no competition.
I believe it was originally the plan to have more manufacturers making these, but maybe both MS and Seagate realised they could milk it some more.
High quality stuff and I agree, there's only Seagate and WD drives
@@riaz8783 nah its just pure greed, MS pulled a Sony VITA, locking Storage expansion with a proprietary hardware
@@Jaxv3rit's compact flash, not proprietary at all
@@lolcatno off the shelf CF Express card works so it is proprietary
Series S storage is like playing Tetris.
My PC storage filling for no reason:
Xbox Series S is the poor kid console
@@ralphtaylor7448
Sad truth is if you buy an Xbox series S and storage expansion card. Your better off buying Xbox series x because they are the same price at that point.
@@ShinyMooTank at least you got the small form factor going for you. If you're a kid and tell your mom to buy a console you better tell xbox, otherwise she will buy the ps5 digital version which is just a scam.
If you have an S and a X it's great if you have a ps5 digital and a physical it's pointless
@@yol_n
I have already made the switch to digital only for Xbox and pc(except for cyberpunk because gamestop was selling brand new ones for $5).
Nintendo is still physical only for me. They can't commit to having backwards compatibility or keep their own shops online.
I wonder if Sony did the digital version and physical version just to test the waters if they could get away with PS6 being all digital if it made the console cheaper.
Xbox was smart with the series S because there was no competition for that price point besides Nintendo and with Game pass they could easily get away with not having a disc drive since backwards compatibility is all the way to the Orginal Xbox.
If you set up your USB (HDD or SSD) drive as the default storage device, it'll automatically install USB-drive-compatible games to it.
Works for me with the listed games.
good tip!
@TokyoFool you're a knob head. In the video he mentions how you can find out what games will install to an external device, so it can be of use and it is related to the subject. You start installing a Series enhanced game and if it can be installed to the external drive, it will be automatically, saving researching into it.
@@Folurby😆😆😆😆😆
@Folurby yes it is. With external drive set to default download location even series x/s games automatically go to usb drive unless they actually need internal, in which case you get a pop up informing you that it needs internal storage and giving options to switch or continue.
i didn't know the price was still so bad for the storage expansion. i helped my stepdad recently upgrade my sister's ps5 with a m.2 drive and he was shocked at the price difference between a storage upgrade for that and a Series console. proprietary storage expansion should not exist
btw, i worked on Squadrons, glad to see you've enjoyed it!
Kind of a shame that this happen. Seems like Seagate doesn't want to let go of their tech to the competition otherwise they will not have the unfair advantage anymore. Which is a shame since it does work. Kind of like a soupedup game cartridge or SD Cards for modern consoles.
@Deliveredmean42T hat's not the issue. The issue is the exclusivity contract that they have with Microsoft on who gets to make these useless, overly expensive expansion drives for the SERIES consoles. The tech itself isn't anything special or unique to Seagate. This is a greed based money grab by both companies, which is why these expansion drives are proprietary. No one should be buying these drives.
These do come on sale once in a while, and drop below the 100 € mark.
@@RaenYrtham Well the problem is not the sales, the problem is that they dont have a permanent price drop. These things are 3 years old at this point, so you expect these to be cheaper, no?
This is the only con of microsoft. Expensive cards
This was inevitably going to be a problem for Xbox at some point. While I do appreciate the advantages of a portable expansion card. They need to keep the price more in line with the market.
I knew proprietary storage would be an issue down the line but remember the ridiculous situation with PlayStation for like a year or so after launch where they had no expansion option - Microsoft offered it from the start but I had hoped that it would have tried to keep prices within range of m.2 drives over time.
Well here's part of the problem The portable storage is nice except you can't use it unless you sign in on the other Xbox. So how portable is it?
@@Dracossaint Uh, what?
@@Dracossaintjust assign your account to a controller. When you connect your controller, it should automatically log in your Xbox account.
Most of these games are older games that received patches to run enhanced on the series consoles but don't take full advantage of the new architecture.
For me I set the default installation location on external harddrive, if the game requires ssd it will tell you before downloading.
In a recent Xbox update there's now an option (shown in MVG's video) to specify where to install backward compatible games and where to install Series X/S only games - with this set correctly you can have it install games that require internal storage to install to it without prompting for each download and still have backward compatible games install on external storage by default.
All games should be downloadable and playable on external hard drives. It’s 2024 smh
If that happens it'll mean companies will have the control of your licenses. Meaning you're not really buying it, you're renting it. Now, we already are, but it will get exponentially worse.
It's a hardware limitation issue, the external hard drives via usb port don't have enough speed, even if it's an ssd due to the limitations of not having usb-c or thunderbolt ports
Speed doesn't matter when it comes to playing video games what kinda shill are you 😂@@jordanchristie3617
@@Geken089that's not how that works old timer, your licenses are linked to your Xbox account. Plus we're already renting it from game pass
@mr.riposte2280 Exactly, and unless you still have access to that account, you're ass out. On top of that, it's been proven that we're effectively renting access to our purchases. I'm just done with digital purchases other than content. Yes, I know it applies to content as well. Most don't sell physical copies of extra content anymore, though.
When I remember correctly: The patched versions of Assassins Creed Origins and Odyssey are also called X|S title but can be run from an external drive.
yeah basicly non series games that got graphical updates like reoslution or fps increase can run on external usb ssd. Reason is they werent patched with the specific need for super fast reading speeds that series native games have been developed with.
@@visker81 Yeah Gen9aware games are basically treating it as a really fast Xbox One
@visker81 Even then, it's very rare for a game to NEED super-fast loading times. Usually it's a matter of wanting them.
Ironically, Sea of Thieves DOES need them. Try playing that game on a SATA II hard drive, see how fast you get sunk.
Guardians of the Galaxy maybe? I really love this game but it's painfully slow on One S. Should I move to Gen 9 if the game runs from external drive?
I didn’t realize that this wasn’t more widely known. I’ve been managing my games like this since Day-1 on my Series X. It’s super nice for MCC.
Same
would be nice for some games but it seems like the applicable games is very limited.
Ditto. I’ve been running Halo: MCC, State of Decay 2, and others of a bog-standard external SSD. For a while Sea of Thieves could too after its X|S update. A later update removed that possibility, however.
Yeah nice indeed and I think it's thanks to backwards compatibility
@@ScrapKing73 are you certain mate? I’m still running Sea of Thieves from an external SSD on my series X 🤷♂️
Edit to add: just double checked and still fully working, installed on an external SSD so you can still do it.
Halo MCC can run off USB storage which is great considering how big that game is.
MS had a missed opportunity when designing the series S & X to add faster USB ports, Sony has them on the PS5, including type C.
The Xbox does a speed test on portable drives to make sure they are fast enough to play xbox games, they should of just added another level to the speed test that enables series S/X game installs.
Even thunderbolt is limited. But I agree, the latest USBC would haven better, but they can always rollout out revisions to the consoles.
The Series consoles use the same Southbridge as the Xbox One. Presumably that's a factor.
Type-C is just a connector, not a bus speed standard. Both consoles use the same USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 ports, which top out at 5gbps, or 500MB/s in the real world. Basically enough to max out a SATA SSD, but still roughly 4-5x slower than the internal drives. Moving to USB 3.2 10gbps or 20gbps would have made a big difference. Still slower than the internal drive, but more than enough for most games.
@@MmntechCa I get 1050.MB/s from a Samsung T7 SSD in USB 3.2.
But you can't run PS5 games off USB storage either, only store them, so I fail to see your point with that comparison.
Yes, I have been running many Xbox One enhanced games from an external 2 TB SSD that I bought back in December 2020 with my Xbox Series X after finding out that these Gen9Aware games don't have to run from the internal storage. This includes the Halo Master Chief Collection which is over 100 GB, I think. I use the internal storage and 2 TB expansion for native Xbox Series games.
The same is also true for the PS5 which can also run enhanced PS4 games from external storage. I have a 4 TB Crucial X6 SSD for all my PS4 games. It's only native apps that need to run from the internal drives on both systems.
Still, I wish that we had more flexibility of where to install native PS5 and Xbox Series X games because I am pretty sure that games like FIFA 23 and NBA 2K23 don't need to run from an internal SSD as I can install those games to an external SATA3 SSD on my PC and the loading times are actually as quick and sometimes quicker than the native versions on my PS5. Having this option would mean that the internal and expansion NVMe storage could be reserved for those games that DO need the faster storage.
Yeah it's been fun moving back and forth my games lol! Thanks for the heads up MVG.😎👍
I just copy them from External to Internal, then when I am done with them…I delete em and copy some more other Games I know wanna play within the coming weekends. 😅 It’s only when they receive Updates that I update the Internal Version, delete the Outdate External Version and move or copy the Updated Internal Game back onto External when I am done playing em.
The fact that you can tell the difference in file types from the UI is a small but nice win for me.
its very easy to know when it can run from USB.. it will not show the 2 arrow (swap icon) even on the USB...
@@bngomes Those icons don't mean shit. Halo MCC has that icon even though it runs from USB just fine.
@@bngomes It would be nice if there was an icon that meant "Series Enhanced but can be played from external USB drive"
I agree with you 100%, the price of the storage is way too expensive and not allowing any other companies to make them so Seagate have the monopoly is very anti consumer
I think the other part of it is that hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of these proprietary expansion cards have already been produced that need to be sold in order to make their profit off of them. Knowing microsoft, there's absolutely no chance that they'd ever discount these cards or allow another manufacturer to produce something similar for cheaper otherwise they'd be taking an absolute massive loss in profit. It simply wouldn't make sense from a buisness standpoint. So yeah, it is anti-consumer. They should have done what Sony did and just use the standard M.2 slot but Microsoft has always been stifflers about their storage. With Xbox 360, they used conventional 2.5" hard drives BUT, they only allowed certain manufacturers and specific models to produce them. If you try to insert any 2.5" hard drive of any kind other than what they made, it won't recognize the drive inserted. The reason they do this is to minimize the chance of exploitation of the console (custom firmware, mods, piracy, ect.) Although it didn't matter as people did find ways to exploit the 360. However with the xbox one, they didn't implement the same security. You can use any 2.5" hard drive or ssd. Not officially anyway, but there is a software on windows someone made that creates and formats the xbox one filesystem to the 2.5" drive you want to install. I personally did this, I installed a 2TB ssd in my xbox one and it works waaaay faster than any hard drive microsoft put in their consoles. It still violates their terms of service, but to my knowledge nobody has been banned for doing this. I don't think it's detectable by their live service. Honestly I don't know why they care, because again to my knowledge, there's no one out there that has installed custom firmware of any kind to the xbox one. I could be wrong, but there's nothing mainstream like there was with 360. So for them to be so worried about exploitation with storage devices is just stupid. They need to do what Sony has already done with the PS5 but I don't see it happening with this generation.
Microsoft pulled a Sony with a proprietary memory card. One reason the vita got hurt
Agree, but Storage expansion card isn't fully proprietary. It's just a CFexpress 1.0 Type-B form-factor with an additional security chip to lock out specific drive types. You could make your own if you find the right drive or firmware for the drive.
That's a small contribution to a bigger issue surrounding the PS Vita failure.
@@Rab1dGAMER it was actually a massive contribution to its failure imo, one of the main reasons a lot of people didn't get ut
@@M_CFV it was obsolete the moment it launched, smartphones were already doing similar and in case of flagship phones beter graphics quality and resolution.
That was also at the time where publishers were trying to bring actual games to mobile before switching over to games with a name of a franchise just to get more money on microtransactions.
Mobile hardware was evolving at an alarming rate back then, so no, not a massive reason, but definitely part of the reason.
@@Rab1dGAMER no, they did not, the ps vita released on 2011, smart phones of the time were the galaxy s2, htc sensation (i used to have one) and the iphone 4s, the ps vita had a better gpu than the iphone 4s (SGX543MP4+, while the iphone had a respectable MP2, that is the core configuration), the ps vita had a similar cpu but a much more powerful gpu with dedicated VRAM (both had 512mb of ram but the vita had 128mb of vram), so no, the ps vita was not obsolete, the main issue was the price and the business model, proprietary memory and a propietary charger (people often forget that the first version of the vita had a proprietary charger) scared away gamers and the 250usd price tag scared away the casual cosumer that could either buy an iphone for 200usd maybe less with a better carrier plan and play candy crush or buy a freshly price dropped 3ds (from 250usd to 170usd) and play mario kart and mario 3d land, sony endded up pinning them self into a wall with greedy bad decisions and using expensive hardware for the time that didn't allow them to price drop on time, 250 usd for a dedicated gaming device was a hard pill to swallow back in 2011.
I've known about this since early 2021 and I've tried to let as many people know about it as I can on Twitter. Glad you're bringing light to this. One thing I noticed was the X/S games that do work on the Series consoles are mostly the smart delivered games from last generation.
I've been running Mass Effect Legendary Edition on an external USB drive on my Series X since the game released, as well as a few other "Series X/S optimised" games. Durango Gen9 Aware titles are just Xbox One games compiled with the Xbox One SDK but have a little bit of extra code that allow them to detect when they're running on a Series X/S, hence Gen9 Aware.
They can use that knowledge to make changes in how they behave on the faster hardware - typically graphical settings like removing a 30fps cap, adding extra video modes like performance/quality etc that don't appear when run on an XBox One. But it's still an Xbox One game running in backward compatibility mode. It gets some benefit from the raw increase in processing power but can't use any of the new features like ray tracing, velocity engine, etc, the latter being why it is allowed to run on an external drive.
Many cross gen games were Gen9 Aware before Microsoft even added the "Series X/S optimised" overlay on game icons in the store and game library, and you've always been able to check the file info to see this as demonstrated in the video. Where things got confusing is when Microsoft added that "Series X/S optimised" logo on our games - and decided to use the same "optimised" logo for both Gen9 Aware titles - which could run on an external drive - and true next gen titles compiled with the GDK, which can't.
They really should have called it "Series X/S enhanced" for these half way titles and reserved "Series X/S optimised" for games compiled with the GDK for Scarlett hardware IMHO, this would have avoided the confusion.
Many games have changed from backward compatible Durango Gen9 Aware titles to GDK Scarlett titles with an update - three I can think of off the top of my head are Doom 2016, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order and The Witcher 3 - all of these updates added raytracing modes and thus required a new GDK build of the game that is not backward compatible to access the raytracing features.
All of these I had installed on an external drive prior to the updates, when the updates came out the Xbox slipstreaming automatically downloaded and installed the entire new build of the game onto my internal storage without asking, filling the drive, and left the old Durango Gen9 Aware versions on the external drive which I had to manually delete!
So having these Gen9 Aware titles on an external drive is nice but does risk them getting automatically installed onto internal storage in the future if the developer ever updates them to be a proper next gen build....
I share MVG's disappointment with the price of the official nvme modules - my Series X is now a bit over 2 years old and I checked just a few days ago to see what the price of the 1TB official storage addon is now and it's still the same as ever - way too expensive.
so here is the funny part about all this 'expansion' situation. WD is who supplies MS with the internal SSD for the Series line. And they were granted a license to release their own expansion cards but for some reason they just have not done that. They were said to have sizes ranging from 256gb (yeah smaller than internal SS storage) up to 4tb. Seagate only recently offered other sizes like 512gb and 2tb and Im not sure when their contract is up but I hope soon. More makers releasing licensed cards is better for consumers.
Or Microsoft can just remove the stupid firmware lock on the expansion port so that passive adapters can work with any pcie 4.0 drive. That would be better for consumers.
I’m so glad you covered this I noticed that master chief collection could still be played off a HDD back when the next gen patch came out
I knew about this already so it's always nice to see someone with a lot of followers spreading the word about it so more people could know.
The reddit thread covers pretty much every title to date, except maybe Far Cry 5, which has now native next gen 60 fps patch and it's using this exact approach - it's Gen9Aware and could be ran from external SSD/HDD no problem.
Oddly, my farcry 5 has the "left & right" arrows that indicates that it needs to be moved to internal storage before it can be played. But does in fact play from external storage.
I found out about this in 2020, kinda surprised you hadnt heard about it until recently, since your channel is probably the most technical one I follow lol.
I’d love to see an OFFICIAL XBOX storage expansion slot dongle that would connect to a fast NVME … that would give consumers choice.
I'd love for console manufacturers to design their consoles to use standard, user replaceable drives.
@@SnakebitSTI Sony did with the PS5, it is super easy to swap the nvme for a bigger one.
Your comment doesn't make sense. These over-priced, proprietary expansion drives ARE OFFICIAL XBOX EXPANSION SLOT DONGLES. That's the problem.
@@wolveric0 Sony did it with the PS2, PS3, and PS4, but not the PS5. The PS5's internal drive is integrated into the motherboard and effectively not user replaceable. Though the PS5 does have an M.2 expansion slot for an additional SSD, so at least expansion storage is not proprietary.
@@SnakebitSTI yeah, that's technically right, the "internal storage" is enbeded/non replasable, and the m.2 slot is considered "additional storage".
I was quite surprised when my Xbox 360 and Xbox One games on a external HHD also has the quick resume function, I thought this was only available for games on the SSD.
I noticed this as well when I was transferring some games and didn’t get the warning it wouldn’t play on my WD Black spinner. Makes sense since some of these games are quite small and/or don’t require much storage throughput to run.
Nah, Master chief collection is a big game. But it also doesn’t strictly need faster speeds as it’s a collection of older games
A good way to take advantage of this is to set your external drive as the primary install location. Then you will get a warning if the game has to be installed to internal storage when you go to download it instead of having to manually check afterwards.
The latest Witcher 3 Raytracing Update is marked as Generation Scarlett but runs fine from my USB 3.1 SSD. Maybe the Publisher can define where the Game has to run.
On the other Hand, Forza Horizon 4 is only updated, because I played it on my original XBox but now on the Series X it got a update and have to be placed on the internal SSD
Are you sure ? Presumably that means it doesn't take advantage of the Direct Storage API / velocity engine. Interesting.
@@dbmandrake Which also suggests Forza Horizon does, which is kinda hilarious given its still faster on PC and will work from a HDD fine there.
I have seen CF express to M.2 nvme adapters are out in the wild but it seems they don't work anymore, I would love the homebrew community to come up with a way to use these reliably if that is even possible
Those only work with 2230 m.2 drives, and good luck finding one of those with the same capacity as the official expansion drive for a lower price.
Excellent summary of this topic, really enjoyed the video as always ❤
YOOOO!
@@Vanessaira-Retro yo yo yo!!
The newer X/S enhanced games that can still be played from the exernal - AC Odyssey and Origins, Far Cry 5, Sniper Elite 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider... those just off the top of my head.
Your title was exactly what I have been wanting to know. Thank you for uploading this video
The linked reddit post is old and not being updated. Best to just check for yourself by going to manage game and then to file info to see if it's gen9 or just gen9aware.
Great tip! I was able to move MCC over to my HDD and free up 120gb on my internal. Also, Seagate isn't the issue, it's MS. Remember the 360? Until we unlocked the partitioning for the HDD, we were stuck with their proprietary storage options too. They just love to keep hardware locked down.
Ehh... did that ever get solved w/o having to run hacked FW? I have an official drive that I bought second-hand, and ran a read/write test on, blanking all the media, before it ever even occurred to me that the 360 would be looking for some secret handshake on-disk. It is now a very glossy USB storage drive, since that's all I can use it for anymore. Does something exist that will resuscitate it? I tried cloning another valid drive, which, of course, did not work...
@@nickwallette6201 You used to be able to find a utility, it was an exe that used a .bin for whatever size drive you had. You'd run the exe, and it'd flash the HDD (connected through USB to SATA or USB to proprietary 360 HDD connection) and it'd partition the drive perfectly for the 360 to recognize it. But it'd work on a non modded 360, the 360 would then see it as a standard OEM HDD
@@jakebonnett1675 That would be nice! I've never quite gotten over the sinking feeling I got when I realized I had just burned that drive. Not that I can't just replace it... I dunno. It just bothers me. haha
I like the bug where if you use the expansion card sometimes your network adapters don't work at all until removal, sweet solution
Sounds like you need to return your console using the warranty and get a new one
Thanks for the Video MVG. It's great to let everyone know about these findings. Unlike me who purchased 2 1TB and 1 2TB Seagate Drives. This will help everyone a lot
Even with the 1TB of internal storage on the Series X it still fills up too fast. I expected by this point Seagate would no longer have the exclusivity but as time goes on it seems like they're going to remain the only partner. I might go the rout of a CF express adapter but haven't really looked into if there's performance losses or not. I feel like they might not be using all the PCI lanes on some of those adapters.
Assassins creed origins
Desperados III
Farcry 5
Skyrim
Halo MCC
Mass effect trilogy
Shadow of the tomb raider
State of decay 2
Ghost recon breakpoint.
And more can all be ran from external storage. If you don't want to check the file info you can simply move your games to an external drive, then filter on external drive and series x, if a game doesn't have the "left & right" arrows in the bottom right of game tile it can be played from external storage
Whats with the weird frame glitch at the bottom? at 6:52 to 6:53
Good on you for raising awareness. I've lost count of the number of times I've pointed this out to people, only to be told I was mistaken.
I have been running around saying this since I got my Series S in 2021 and connected an external SSD to it.
Glad you're covering it and giving it more exposure because I always grab my head when I see people forking out the big bucks for Microsoft's expensive Seagate Expansion.
you can set your download to external storage , then if the game cant run on the external storage you'll see a arrow pointing left and right
I noticed that long ago, that some labelled Xbox Series games can run on a slower drive.
However it does seem like only games that have received a 60fps patch with their Series label work on slower drives (AC Origins / Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider...).
In these, apparantly, no further Series optimizations were made.
They got the Series label while not technically being true Series versions.
Ori being the exception.
Ori isn’t a true Series game either
@@memoryman3586 Ori does offer more than a framerate boost, running at 6K on Series X, that's what I meant
Nice Speedball T 👊
Brutal Deluxe was one of my favourite games back on the Amiga
I buy/sell Xbox series regularly and the fact the expansion card is more expensive then the console and controller is nuts
They really need to start making 2TB models of these consoles so we dont have to buy this expensive expansion crap
One thing that thoroughly annoyed me was when Forza Horizon 4 got an update that made it go from something that ran just fine on external storage to requiring running from internal. And there was no way to refuse the update or force it to use the Xbox One version, as far as I could tell.
If the Xbox platform wasn't a DRM hell box, I would upgrade to a Series X. But having no internet and being blocked from games I paid for is absolutely ridiculous*. However, this is cool news to hear*. This was another reason why I haven't moved on from Xbox one x due to the storage options. On my One X, I have 5TB total and I never needed to worry about space. But man, it's a real pain to have to delete and reinstall games like crazy. Really looking forward to them HOPEFULLY fixing this in time.... Or just Go PC and PS5. Lol
But you can play your 5TB of Xbox One X games from the same external drives connected to your Series X... 🤦♂ The only ones you can't play are native Series X games of which there aren't many yet due to how long the crossgen support is dragging on.
@@Lockieez that is the point of the problem. The point I was making is how simple it is for the Xbox one X to expand storage over how annoying it is for the Series consoles. The method I used wouldn't be effective for current gen games and I'd have to get lucky rather than have a sure fire way to solve the issue. If I can't use my current 4TB external hard drive to play ALL games then that's the problem. Didn't think that Id have to break that down. But whatever. If
Just like with playstation, if you aren't game sharing with somebody and have your main console you use marked as your primary one, you can play all your games offline forever without having to refresh licenses
@@M_CFV yeah, I set up all of that as it should be and I'm still locked out of some of my Digital games. Trust me, I tried. If when you attempt to boot up any game on Xbox one and up says " getting your game ready " it's checking for an Internet connection. If there isn't one, it's blocking you. Due to my budget I can't afford internet outside of my very slow hotspot. I can play games online just enough but as soon as a patch is needed, I'm fucked. Lol it takes me a week just to download 300mb. Like it's not reliable for gaming. And just to clarify, these are games that I fully paid for. From digital Xbox to Xbox one games. It's swing and miss and if that message pops up, you can't play without internet.
On my PS4, I never ran into issues playing ANYTHING offline. Digital and physical games.same with switch. Unless it was a PlayStation plus or switch online game/DLC, you know, the obvious things that won't work without internet they outperform the Xbox platform when it comes to that. Trust me. I have tried everything for the Xbox. And since they want to push game pass so hard, they don't want you to have any ownership of your copies and want to control what you play on their platform. The ONLY thing that can save Xbox for me is if Perfect Dark will be any good. But there are rumors that it will be a live service. And if that's so... Peace Xbox. Lol it was fun
On another note
Exactly the same, but smaller external drive. I put 2 TB internal SSD and XSX looks silly for me.
If you don't have to move a game from usb storage, that's great. Less read / writes to a drive the better. This is a list to keep an eye on.
Another quality MVG video with interesting information. I wonder though, what's behind the blurred out section? What sort of secrets has MVG got going on!
@ModernVintageGamer You can add Skyrim, Shadow of the Tomb Raider & Far Cry 5 to that list.
That's good news! Great to save internal storage space for Series S/X only games while putting all Xbox One stuff in a cheaper external drive.
Just be aware that the bottleneck speed in loading games, even on an SSD, is the USB port so that's why MS made a "proprietary" port which hooks directly to the mother board for speed.
I discovered MCC being compatible with my external hard drive by accident and looked up the same list of games you showed.
Ermm RUclips.. I am subscribed and have ALL notifications set to on, on this channel. How come I am seeing this a day late?!?!?
Microsoft does the same thing with audio devices. I work in product development for a gaming peripherals brand, and in order for USB audio devices to work with Xbox One or Series S|X, they need an (expensive) Microsoft "security" chip. Their compatibility testing was a joke years ago too. They would miss issues one round of testing and then catch them another, so they clearly were not following much of a test plan.
I found a bug that they tried to blame our product for, and then took years to fix it. On Xbox One several years ago, if you were in a game chat (not party chat), and then disconnected and reconnected your audio device (if it used a dongle, reconnect the dongle, if it paired directly to the console, power-cycle the headset), game/chat balance controls (which are required by Microsoft) would stop working correctly. The control of chat volume would be stuck at 100%, while game volume adjustments continued to function correctly. I ran into this during testing, assumed we had a firmware bug, and then realized that it was actually an Xbox issue.
Noticed this recently with the Goldeneye relaunch. Even though it's optimised for X|S, it runs off external
THX!! Very useful information, have always loved and valued your channel’s content!
Someone needs to figure out a way to make your own Expansion Card. Perhaps they can figure out what makes the WD or Seagate expansions work with the series x, and use that same partition structure/handshake code to essentially emulate the seagate or wd cards to create our own 8TB expansion cards.
So durango and scarlett, gotcha 👍👍👍 this is a HUGE help. Every series X/S owner needs to know this!
They same games are played on pc with many users still only using Sata 3 SSD which are about 5x slower compared to what’s inside the series x. Anyway if it’s possible to play them games on pc with sata SSD then it should entirely be possible for games to be played on Xbox via External sata 3 ssd as you are able to pick up 6tb even 8th external drives quite easily theys days.
thanks for the reddit. your the goat!!
That is interesting, even though it would make sense that Xbox One games would be able to run from USB, I didn't realize that Microsoft were implying that they wouldn't work. I guess they wanted to mask the differences between Gen9 aware executable and native Gen 9 ones to make it more consistent for users.
I 100% agree that both Microsoft and Sony should allow developers to opt out of the NVMe requirement for native Gen 9 games that won't necessarily take advantage of the tech. It would be a big win for the end user.
(Small nitpick, M.2 is a _physical_ form factor. What Xbox memory cards do have in common with the M.2 drives you'd use in a PS5 is that they use the NVMe protocol.)
One thing to note is another of these games do offer cloud gaming so there's no need to install if you've got a solid internet connection, this does help big time on storage
I was happy to see a couple Series X consoles out in the wild yesterday ready to purchase. Only took about 2.5 years.
Every game should be this way to work around the insane pricing Seagate has on the memory cards
Interesting information. My nephew gonna love hearing this. Thank you so much~
I will never understand why they FORCE you to download the Series X/S versions of games instead of installing last gen versions to play off of hard drives, i wanted to install the assassins creed games but they’re too big for my Series X internal storage so i tried to install the last gen version but it didn’t let me for some reason
The reason is easy to understand, MS is loosing money on the sell of Xbox Series they want to offset their losses with the purchase of Seagate memory card.
@@Therealgamer-fb7jw Or on PS5 where you can install every version you want. Even last gen 1.00 to remove the framerate lock on many games xD
@@Therealgamer-fb7jw Yes some games, work the same as the new generation and I play them on my One S, for instance Far Cry 6 and AC Valhalla you gain almost 270 gigs on your Series X, ofc not the same quality; but as newer games are coming without being compatible with old gen I have plenty of room for them.
That Reddit thread is how I found out about this tip. Due to the insane prices of the expansion drives, my Series X hasn't been touched in months and have been putting more time into the PS5 and Steam Deck, thanks to the prices of 2TB 2280s and 1TB 2230s dropping.
I can confirm this. I had a old 10 TB Seagate external HDD from last gen. I noticed that some game forced me to install to the internal but games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead 2 would run just fine off the external
@TokyoFool they have the X/S logo on them, but i think they are technically running the One version
I think x/s version would be also for the Xbox one x and Xbox one S and then if it also says optimized for series x and series S are the one that can't be played on external :(
I was aware that various games could be played from external storage, but that has been via trial-and-error. Thanks for this tip in looking at the file info for verification.
It's because of Gen9Aware games that I preferred the old way to manage storage. Before you could set the external as the default installation location for games and would be prompted for any GDK games to install internally while gen9aware would install and play just fine. Now I need to micromanage the games to best make use of my storage
It would be nice if I could switch between which version of the game I want instead of being forced to upgrade the games.
Great channel bro!
Cool! Guess what I am going to go do next? :) Love this channel!
200 bucks for 1tb is nuts, especially for the Series S which is a 300 dollar console. At that point you'll just regret not buying a Series X.
I have an idea. If someone could compare these XS optimised games if they were installed on PC with similar specs but installed on Sata drive that would give a good estimate how it would run on XSX external drive. I wonder how it would go.
the Seagate sales guy that closed the Microsoft deal is a genius lmao. Finessed microsoft hard.
Some other optimized games that run from USB (tested myself):
- AC Odyssey
- Far Cry 5
- Sniper Elite 4
- Skyrim
- Rocket League
What I do is I use USB as default installation path for all games. If a game needs internal storage, it pops a message at the start of installation warning you of that and giving the option of installing it to internal storage instead. If the game can be run from USB, this message isn't shown, be it the game optimized or not.
The Xbox cards are this generation's PSVita's memory cards. Sheesh!
Thanks for the vid.
Another simple way to see if a game is Gen9Aware : when managing it, if it has the "Compatibility options" submenu it's either a backward compatible game or a Gen9Aware game.
Series X|S games do not have the "Compatibility options" submenu.
I forgot about Smoke Monster. He seemed to stop posting to his YT channel shortly after moving back to the US.
I found this out by accident. I reinstalled Halo MCC in it's entirety as it automatically chose my external drive and didn't give me the "please install to internal" message. I was wondering why my internal space wasn't eaten up because it usually sits around 70-80%
A little update on this, apparently now, if you see a little transfer icon. Then it has to be put on. I believe the internal. But if it doesn't have the little transfer icon, you can play it off external even if it has the symbol of optimized, I can't even play some off my external HHD according to this.
This is my biggest complaint on the Series S & Series X. I have an 8TB external HHD on my Xbox S with almost 200 titles on it. Some have enhanced versions for the Series S or Series X. I have yet to setup my Series X console for this reason alone. It should be up to the console owner if we want to live with slower load times to use external USB storage.
I'm not about to shell out $200 on an SSD storage card. These should only cost a few dollars more than an SSD of equal size. Hopefully there will be more makers for the aftermarket cards that are not out to rape us on price. Thanks for the video. The info and list is very welcoming.
Hi dude. You t-shirt speedball is so awsome !! Where did you find it ?
I think the games that have the arrows icon are ones that will only run on the internal storage or an expansion card. But one thing I do is by default install everything to my external hard drive and move them to my internal when i'm going to play it. I'm one that doesn't play many different games in a short period of time so moving a game to the internal isn't a huge deal for me.
Reminds me of players installing mods for Knights of The Old Republic on their original xBoxes...I wonder if this could be used for installing new apps and whatnot, for development purposes?
When the Series consols came out i got the S right away and over time did notice Xbox One game or you refure to them as XDK games where being optimised for the Series console and once they where you where forced to move them to you internal drive and for me having the Series S that want a choice so I did ramble about it on Twitter and or Reddit and a number of people either had the Series X or a Xbox one so they didn't have much of an issue due to the X having way moori storage the Xbox One not having the capability. i did ramble about the issue because Xbox said the games have to be on the internal drive so it doesn't cause issues for other people in multiplayer games but the Series Optimisation was also happening to games that didn't have multiplayer so after my complaints they let you put them on the external drive but it was a wile later until they did it and I'm surprised Xbox hasn't done something to show you can. my best guess to why they haven't made it more clear is for getting more sales for the Expantion cards.
I’m glad there’s some optimized Series S games that can work on USB external storage, but I still hate the Series S for having such a bare bones storage space, especially when it lacks an optical drive, my Xbox One S is still more useful than the Series S because it has 4K blu ray drive!
@Modern Vintage Gamer there were some significant sales (at least here in the US) for the 1 and 2 terabyte expansion cards during the last 2 months of 2022.
In regard to the games you mentioned optimized for Series S/X that can be stored and run from a usb hard drive, are you sure they’re running with Series S/X optimizations and not Xbox One X optimizations? I’d be curious to know for certain wether or not these games run more optimized off the NVMe or perform the same off a usb hard drive.
Thanks
I noticed this with the Master Chief collection and Sea of thieves about a year ago. I think Shadow of the tomb raider also works off usb storage as well.
You are a life saver - I was getting really pissed off having to manage my downloads, especially when coming across games that are why larger than you think they would be - just two examples being Persona 4 & 5. Playground Games really need to sort out the optimisation for Forza 4 & 5 too
Microsoft is the majority shareholder for Seagate, through the vanguard group, so no surprise the price has remained fixed.china also benefits as another large shareholder. Anyone surprised?
Nice video. I still use an external hard drive and play older games off that. Move newer stuff there if I need the room. It would be nice to expand if your playing say lots of CODs and Battlefields here and there but it’s not a must.
It was widely known, bro. Seen some reddit topics on that also;) My first game that I could run from USB HDD was the AC Origins after the patch, if I remember correctly.
Looked through the stuff I had downloaded and found another. Goldeneye 007 is marked as a Series X|S title but when looking at the file info, it's not an XboxGen9Aware game but just an XboxOne game. It should work but I'll have to test later when I'm off work
I've noticed this since before Christmas for the Xbox series X games I have that's working on the game drive is conon exiles and state of decay 2 and crypt of the sepent king
On the PS5, PS4 games are just labeled as PS4 whether or not they were enhanced for the PS5. On Xbox, they’ll call anything an X:S game even if it’s an Xbox one game with enhancements.
This just adds to the confusion.
What exactly is it that make a game require the internal or official expansion?
MS needs to release an exhaustive list on what does and doesn't need it.
Microsoft should have just made the series s to come with a minimum of a 1tb out the box . 500gb is nothing these days. Just forcing the consumer to buy their proprietary storage to make money .