If you own an Xbox One, chances are you’re racking up quite a collection of games and getting close to the 500 GB storage limit. There is the option of opening up the console and swapping it out for a larger storage drive, but that takes a lot of time — not to mention that opening up the console could void your warranty. Fortunately, Western Digital made an external hard drive just for the console gamer.
The My Passport X features USB 3.0 and a whopping 2 TB of storage. The large amount of space should be ample room for a number of titles; paired with the 500 GB of in-console storage, it gives you a total of 2.5 TB. You can also choose to install your favorite games on the My Passport X, so you can bring it to a friend’s house and play titles on their Xbox One without having to reinstall it on their system.
Setup of the My Passport X is quite simple, but then it should be, because a lot of the installation duties are handled at the Xbox One end. Depending on how you have your console set up, getting access to the USB ports might be the hardest part. The My Passport X is entirely bus powered, so all you need to do is plug it in and power up your Xbox One.
For a drive specifically aimed at the Xbox One market, it’s curious to note that the My Passport X isn’t pre-formatted for Xbox One use. As such, you can copy video or music content to it from your PC or Mac and quite merrily use it immediately, but if you do want to use it for games storage, you’re going to have to format it from the Xbox One. Bear in mind that this is a full format, so it’s either a games storage device, or a media storage device with direct PC accessibility.
You would expect the drive to work on most computers and consoles, but the product page shows (and a Western Digital rep confirmed) that the drive isn’t compatible with the PlayStation 4 because the file structure in the My Passport X isn’t compatible with Sony’s console.
The idea of putting most of the games on the bigger drive and leaving space on the smaller, internal hard drive is reminiscent of the setup on many PCs these days. Most people install the OS on the smaller-capacity storage device, usually an SSD, and keep the space-hungry games on the larger device, usually an HDD. But in this case, both the console and external drive are HDDs, so the advantage here is simply having that extra (and portable) storage capacity.
Verdict: Considering the amount of money spent on the console plus multiple games, the My Passport X is a relatively inexpensive buy at Rs. 8,500. Today’s games require a lot of space, and the amount of internal storage can only hold so much. At this stage, storage expansion is considered mandatory, and unless you want to keep reinstalling games over and over again, adding more storage is highly recommended.
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