Seagate’s new portable Xbox One SSD promises faster game load times

You know we live in the modern gaming era when one of our chief concerns is how fast a game loads from the console’s sluggish spinning hard drive. 

Seagate wants to help you out with a brand new, faster Game Drive – at least if you own an Xbox One or the brand new Xbox One S.

The storied storage firm has announced a 512GB, solid-state (SSD) version of its Game Drive product, simply known as the Game Drive for Xbox SSD, for $199 (about £162, AU$260) on Amazon, GameStop and other online stores. 

And apparently, it's meeting rabid demand, as it’s already out of stock on Amazon as of this writing. (Of course, you can still order one for when it does get restocked.)

Why are people seemingly foaming at the mouth over this slick, stylish aluminum SSD?

All the benefit without any of the hassle

For one, most gamers never bother to upgrade the storage within their system of choice because – no matter how easy it might be – opening a console yourself generally tends to void its warranty.

Secondly, most supplemental console hard drives worth their salt require their own power source to operate, and that’s just one more cord to worry about. Being a portable, external SSD that does not require its own power, this Game Drive solves both of these issues.

And, finally, Seagate promises that this drive will reduce load times for the games installed on it, though it won’t say by how much. For what it’s worth, it being an SSD would make load times faster regardless, as the stock disk within any Xbox One is a spinning drive, and SSDs are inherently faster.

• Get ahead of the best Black Friday deals right now

Be wary, though: 512GB sounds big, but Seagate amounts that to room for about 15 games in total. (That’s based on a 35GB to 50GB average for most Xbox One games.) So, you’ll have to choose which of your most-played games to store on this device.

Also, keep in mind that, if you want to use this SSD over at your buddy’s place, you’ll need to log in with your Xbox Live account to access its contents.

Regardless, 200 bucks for up to 15 Xbox One games that load faster and that you can take on the go with you seems like a worthy premium – at least to the people that have already spoken on Amazon. Be on the lookout for deals on this bad boy come this Black Friday. We sure will.

 Can’t wait for a restock? Here’s another option 

If you just can’t be patient for painless faster storage for your Xbox One, you could always buy a far cheaper, internal laptop SSD and a PCI-E to USB 3.0 housing for it – the latter being just $10 (about £8, AU$13) on Amazon.

 Take the above Seagate 1TB SSHD, for instance. It’s less than half the price of the Seagate Game Drive for Xbox One SSD and offers twice the capacity while still improving load times over the Xbox One’s stock drive with its solid-state cache.

You just need to put in a little extra work to gain the benefit. Sometimes, it pays to dig around, eh?