Western Digital Offers External Gaming Console Storage With My Passport X (Updated)

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.

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.

Considering the amount of money spent on the console plus multiple games, the My Passport X is a relatively inexpensive buy at $139. 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.

UPDATE (4/1/2015, 12:45pm PT):Western Digital told us that all external drives, not just the My Passport X are incompatible with the PlayStation 4 in terms of transferring full games. The only thing you can export from the PS4 is saved game files, not the full game itself. The closest thing we’ve seen to an “external” drive is Nyko’s Data Bank peripheral, which allows the user to remove the PS4’s front plate and replace it with a larger drive slot for 3.5-inch drives instead of the PS4’s default 2.5-inch HDDs.

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