External SSD for Xbox Series X and PS5

Now that Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 have been launched, many fans are excited about the new game releases and looking at external SSDs to support their expanding gaming libraries.  That may lead you to wonder what external SSD to use with your PS5 or Xbox Series X. Long story short:

• Xbox Series X games can be stored on a third-party drive. Players will need to copy them over to the internal drive or expansion card in order to play them. 
• Sony PlayStation 5 games can only be played directly from licensed drives. But, like the Series X, you can play PS4 titles from third-party devices.

Read on for more in-depth information.

Unlike previous consoles, the Xbox Series X is designed to only allow new gameplay from its internal drive or a licensed external drive. But this doesn't mean a third-party SSD like the Crucial X8 cannot be useful to Xbox gamers. 

1. Series X games can be stored on a third-party drive. Players will just need to copy them over to the internal drive or expansion card in order to play them. 
2. Since Series X is backwards compatible with all Xbox 360 and original Xbox titles, an external SSD like the Crucial X8 is a great place to store older games that you still want to play. This is perfect for gamers who want to keep expanding their libraries rather than sacrificing old favorites to make way for newer titles.
3. The Crucial X8 is a high-quality, fast, affordable option when compared to licensed expansion cards that can cost quite a bit more per terabyte.
   

About the console itself:

The Xbox Series X is impressive, from its 4K gaming at up to 120 frames per second to its super-fast load times. With its AMD internals, the X uses Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures and is 2x more powerful than the previous generation of Xbox One. The Series X comes standard with a super-fast 1TB internal NVMe SSD and has a slot for a proprietary NVMe card.

The Xbox Series X is backwards compatible with Xbox One hardware, so luckily there is no need to buy new accessories. The Series X is also backwards compatible with every generation of Xbox games. So luckily, your oldie-but-goodie gaming library is still going to work on your new console.

Sony chose a custom-built 825GB internal SSD for its storage device. The PS5 has an impressive throughput of 5.5GB/s of raw data, and up to 9GB/s of compressed data. This gets you fast load times when booting up and overcomes many streaming and data bottlenecks from previous Sony consoles. Similar to the Series X, Sony chose to only allow PS5 games to be played directly from licensed drives. But, like the Series X, you can play PS4 titles from third-party devices like the X8.

About the console itself:

Sony really brought their A game with the PS5. It is powered by a custom version of the third gen AMD Ryzen processor using Zen 2 architectures like the Xbox Series X. The CPU runs at 2.23GHz on 36 compute units, offering 10.28TFLOPs. While this may be getting a little too technical for the average user, what this means in practical terms is that the P5 is designed for advanced features like ray tracing -- a performance-intensive lighting technique that was previously reserved for high-end gaming PC GPUs. 

To make that even simpler, the PS5 offers amazing graphics previously unavailable in console gaming. So, you can get really good graphics on your console. When you pair that with PS5's ability to support resolutions up to 8k on an HDMI 2.1 compliant display, you will see incredibly smooth game play. So, the days of trying to compare a PC vs Console are becoming less and less in terms of graphics.

We would venture to say that, if you are like us and eyeing a new Xbox Series X or PS5 console, you already have an extensive gaming library for the previous gen consoles. And like us, you still enjoy playing them. While you can’t store the latest releases on a Crucial X8, you can move your previous library over at less cost than buying an expansion card or licensed external drive. And, if we are lucky, Sony and Microsoft will listen to gamers and allow the use of third-party storage devices. Fingers crossed. 

With speeds up to 1050MB/s¹, the Crucial X8 runs up to 1.8x faster than other portable SSDs and up to 7.5x faster than portable HDDs.¹ Store with confidence on the Crucial X8. There hasn’t been a better time to add a Crucial X8 portable SSD for your gaming library.

1. MB/s speed measured as maximum sequential performance of device as measured by Crucial on a high performance desktop computer with Crystal Disk Mark (version 6.0.2 for x64). Your performance may vary. Comparative speed claims measured as maximum sequential performance of similarly situated portable SSDs, mainstream portable HDDs and mainstream USB flash drives from vertically-integrated manufacturers selling under their own brands as of June 2019.
2. Compatibility may vary and may be contingent on device formatting and host capabilities. For more information, see https://crucial.com/support/x8