Seagate’s new Xbox One SSD for Xbox One wants to minimize game load times, but this won’t be the only innovation in this direction.
This is the week of E3, the world’s most important video game fair, but that doesn’t mean that only new games will be presented. As Seagate has demonstrated, there is also room for hardware, if it enhances the gamer experience.
something that destroys that experience, it’s the loading times. Today all consoles come with internal storage; in the case of Xbox One and PS4, with a hard drive, which is not exactly characterized by speed. Now that we’re buying more and more digital games, or we’re downloading huge patches to play, we need fast storage for our console.
New SSD for Seagate Xbox One to speed up game loading
That’s what Seagate wants with its new Game Drive, an SSD that connects to our Xbox One via the USB 3.0 port; immediately, that should make a significant improvement in the performance of our games.
Specifically, in the loading times, which would be reduced; in addition, you can also notice that open world games, which require loading content from the disk, don’t “crash” as often. Read performance is 540 MB/s, so you should notice the difference from the 140 MB/s of the built-in hard drive.
The big question is, what are the differences between a normal external SSD and the Seagate Game Drive? Well, not many. It’s a Microsoft-approved device, so it has the Xbox logo on the case, and the style is clearly inspired by the Xbox One X.
In addition, for the purchase of Seagate Game Drive, we will receive two months free of charge of Xbox Game Pass; the subscription service that allows us to access a large library of games and that Microsoft will promote including the new features that will be launched from now on.
In addition to buying an SSD, there will soon be more ways to make our games load faster. At the E3 conference, Microsoft announced FastStart technology.
Our console will use automatic learning to select the files needed to start playing our games and will load them first, so the games are expected to start twice as fast as they do now.
The Seagate Game Drive will be available in three models: 500 GB ($150), 1 TB ($300) and 2 TB ($600). It will be available in the coming months.