ESO on Xbox One SSD/SSHD

killbandel

I'm looking at what type of external hard drive I want for my Xbox one. I'm seeing mixed results depending on the game to whether or not an SSD/SSHD makes any significant difference. Does anyone have any experience with either compared to stock? I'm not looking to spend $100 more than a normal drive if it only saves me 1-2 seconds on load times.

Thanks,

Banky71

I am not sure the load time difference but it seems way faster to me. I really got it for when Rock Band 4 comes out because I have 1000' of songs for it but it seems way faster with the SSHD compared to the stock one.

traigusb14_ESO2

It has to do with connections. (this all has to do with external drives. mess with internal drive at your own risk.)

Oddly enough, the internal HDD connection is not that fast. I'm using an external drive and it is a little bit faster than the internal (both the spin /access speed and the transfer rate are faster see below)

External connection is through USB 3 format, which is faster than the internal data rate, not by a huge amount, BUT the USB 3 speed will cap out on really fast external drives, creating a bottleneck at the cable.

So there are a range of relatively inexpensive drives that will both give you a greater storage and a small speed increase over the internal drives, but really fast drives will be throttled by the USB interface.

Also be sure not to get a drive that is only USB2.. ti will be WAAAAAAAy slower.

Generally I have read that any drive that runs faster than ~7900 rpm will probably have onboard data transfer support faster than USB 3 (so it is a waste to use it on an Xbox rather than a PC. through faster cable/chipsets). They will work, and be faster than the built-in drive, but will be limited by the cable and never reach true speeds.

IIRC the internal drive is ~5600 rpm

Solid state is always a waste because USB 3 is waaaaay slower than PC internal connection speeds.

So you can get a drive and put it into a USB3 enclosure, or buy a drive that is already in an external drive package (as long as it is USB3) You can get a decent 2-4 TB drive pretty cheap, because they don't have to be super high speed. The difference will be noticeable though.

Attorneyatlawl

traigusb14_ESO2 wrote: »

It has to do with connections. (this all has to do with external drives. mess with internal drive at your own risk.)

Oddly enough, the internal HDD connection is not that fast. I'm using an external drive and it is a little bit faster than the internal (both the spin /access speed and the transfer rate are faster see below)

External connection is through USB 3 format, which is faster than the internal data rate, not by a huge amount, BUT the USB 3 speed will cap out on really fast external drives, creating a bottleneck at the cable.

So there are a range of relatively inexpensive drives that will both give you a greater storage and a small speed increase over the internal drives, but really fast drives will be throttled by the USB interface.

Also be sure not to get a drive that is only USB2.. ti will be WAAAAAAAy slower.

Generally I have read that any drive that runs faster than ~7900 rpm will probably have onboard data transfer support faster than USB 3 (so it is a waste to use it on an Xbox rather than a PC. through faster cable/chipsets). They will work, and be faster than the built-in drive, but will be limited by the cable and never reach true speeds.

IIRC the internal drive is ~5600 rpm

Solid state is always a waste because USB 3 is waaaaay slower than PC internal connection speeds.

So you can get a drive and put it into a USB3 enclosure, or buy a drive that is already in an external drive package (as long as it is USB3) You can get a decent 2-4 TB drive pretty cheap, because they don't have to be super high speed. The difference will be noticeable though.

Actually, USB3 supports a fairly good 80 megabyte per second or so throughput, and the main speed increase goīng from an HDD to an SSD isn't raw transfer speed, but access time and small reads/writes: something MMORPG titles rely heavily on. An HDD has a variable access time, for the Xbox One and PS4 drives this will range from around 7 to 12ms typically per seek but is done repeatedly for different bits of data, slowing the loading to a comparative crawl. SSD's function more akin to RAM insofar as they have zero variance in access times (negligible internal controller latency) and seek at well under one tenth of a single millisecond (ms). They excel at small IO and random IO, which are the main bottlenecks by a mile that you normally notice when using a device with a storage drive of any kind. So while yes, it's somewhat accurate to say that the raw bandwidth won't be more than a doubling in this scenario for sequential reads, the majority of the disk activity isn't sequential anyways, and so an external USB3 SSD or SSHD (hdd with ssd buffer and cache) will be an immediately obvious and massive gain in practical speed from an upgrade .

traigusb14_ESO2

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

traigusb14_ESO2 wrote: »

It has to do with connections. (this all has to do with external drives. mess with internal drive at your own risk.)

Oddly enough, the internal HDD connection is not that fast. I'm using an external drive and it is a little bit faster than the internal (both the spin /access speed and the transfer rate are faster see below)

External connection is through USB 3 format, which is faster than the internal data rate, not by a huge amount, BUT the USB 3 speed will cap out on really fast external drives, creating a bottleneck at the cable.

So there are a range of relatively inexpensive drives that will both give you a greater storage and a small speed increase over the internal drives, but really fast drives will be throttled by the USB interface.

Also be sure not to get a drive that is only USB2.. ti will be WAAAAAAAy slower.

Generally I have read that any drive that runs faster than ~7900 rpm will probably have onboard data transfer support faster than USB 3 (so it is a waste to use it on an Xbox rather than a PC. through faster cable/chipsets). They will work, and be faster than the built-in drive, but will be limited by the cable and never reach true speeds.

IIRC the internal drive is ~5600 rpm

Solid state is always a waste because USB 3 is waaaaay slower than PC internal connection speeds.

So you can get a drive and put it into a USB3 enclosure, or buy a drive that is already in an external drive package (as long as it is USB3) You can get a decent 2-4 TB drive pretty cheap, because they don't have to be super high speed. The difference will be noticeable though.

Actually, USB3 supports a fairly good 80 megabyte per second or so throughput, and the main speed increase goīng from an HDD to an SSD isn't raw transfer speed, but access time and small reads/writes: something MMORPG titles rely heavily on. An HDD has a variable access time, for the Xbox One and PS4 drives this will range from around 7 to 12ms typically per seek but is done repeatedly for different bits of data, slowing the loading to a comparative crawl. SSD's function more akin to RAM insofar as they have zero variance in access times (negligible internal controller latency) and seek at well under one tenth of a single millisecond (ms). They excel at small IO and random IO, which are the main bottlenecks by a mile that you normally notice when using a device with a storage drive of any kind. So while yes, it's somewhat accurate to say that the raw bandwidth won't be more than a doubling in this scenario for sequential reads, the majority of the disk activity isn't sequential anyways, and so an external USB3 SSD or SSHD (hdd with ssd buffer and cache) will be an immediately obvious and massive gain in practical speed from an upgrade .

Thanks,

I stand corrected. SSDs aren't my strong point.

Most stuff I read said it was mainly a waste of a good SSD... it may just have been tech people bemoaning a 5% potential loss lol. people get a bit crazy over 1% and 3 FPS sometimes.

I do know I got a very noticeable boost for just throwing on a $135 on sale+ shipping 4 TB drive. Plus 4x storage.

CapnPhoton

I got this right before the game came out and it's been really good. Very fast and I haven't had any freezes. Very fast game loading. It is also USB powered so no extra cord. It takes about a minute to set up. You just have to make sure you use the option to install games to it, not just a media drive.

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Portable-External-STEA2000400/dp/B00TKFEE5S/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1437527463&sr=1-1&keywords=Seagate+Expansion+2TB+Portable+External+Hard+Drive+USB+3.0+(STEA2000400)&pebp=1437527467111&perid=1QRDXTT7VEVR3JMKK294

I don't know why it needs a link that long...

Attorneyatlawl

traigusb14_ESO2 wrote: »

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

traigusb14_ESO2 wrote: »

It has to do with connections. (this all has to do with external drives. mess with internal drive at your own risk.)

Oddly enough, the internal HDD connection is not that fast. I'm using an external drive and it is a little bit faster than the internal (both the spin /access speed and the transfer rate are faster see below)

External connection is through USB 3 format, which is faster than the internal data rate, not by a huge amount, BUT the USB 3 speed will cap out on really fast external drives, creating a bottleneck at the cable.

So there are a range of relatively inexpensive drives that will both give you a greater storage and a small speed increase over the internal drives, but really fast drives will be throttled by the USB interface.

Also be sure not to get a drive that is only USB2.. ti will be WAAAAAAAy slower.

Generally I have read that any drive that runs faster than ~7900 rpm will probably have onboard data transfer support faster than USB 3 (so it is a waste to use it on an Xbox rather than a PC. through faster cable/chipsets). They will work, and be faster than the built-in drive, but will be limited by the cable and never reach true speeds.

IIRC the internal drive is ~5600 rpm

Solid state is always a waste because USB 3 is waaaaay slower than PC internal connection speeds.

So you can get a drive and put it into a USB3 enclosure, or buy a drive that is already in an external drive package (as long as it is USB3) You can get a decent 2-4 TB drive pretty cheap, because they don't have to be super high speed. The difference will be noticeable though.

Actually, USB3 supports a fairly good 80 megabyte per second or so throughput, and the main speed increase goīng from an HDD to an SSD isn't raw transfer speed, but access time and small reads/writes: something MMORPG titles rely heavily on. An HDD has a variable access time, for the Xbox One and PS4 drives this will range from around 7 to 12ms typically per seek but is done repeatedly for different bits of data, slowing the loading to a comparative crawl. SSD's function more akin to RAM insofar as they have zero variance in access times (negligible internal controller latency) and seek at well under one tenth of a single millisecond (ms). They excel at small IO and random IO, which are the main bottlenecks by a mile that you normally notice when using a device with a storage drive of any kind. So while yes, it's somewhat accurate to say that the raw bandwidth won't be more than a doubling in this scenario for sequential reads, the majority of the disk activity isn't sequential anyways, and so an external USB3 SSD or SSHD (hdd with ssd buffer and cache) will be an immediately obvious and massive gain in practical speed from an upgrade .

Thanks,

I stand corrected. SSDs aren't my strong point.

Most stuff I read said it was mainly a waste of a good SSD... it may just have been tech people bemoaning a 5% potential loss lol. people get a bit crazy over 1% and 3 FPS sometimes.

I do know I got a very noticeable boost for just throwing on a $135 on sale+ shipping 4 TB drive. Plus 4x storage.

Welcome , and yeah... a lot of technically knowledgeable people get far too caught up in the trees, and miss the forest entirely . The built-in HDD's for the XB1 and PS4 are definitely clunkers, compared to any modern 3.5" HDD you can buy as you noticed !

QuebraRegra

I suspect the results would be imperceptible with this game... I think the limiting factor is the server.

Maybe more bandwidth, and a lower latency connection might help.

Where are these MEGA SERVERS geographically speaking for NS XBOX anyway?

CapnPhoton

QuebraRegra wrote: »

I suspect the results would be imperceptible with this game... I think the limiting factor is the server.

Maybe more bandwidth, and a lower latency connection might help.

Where are these MEGA SERVERS geographically speaking for NS XBOX anyway?

Perhaps people need to examine their own network too. I have had very few issues since day 1.

Gamertaglemieux

killbandel wrote: »

I'm looking at what type of external hard drive I want for my Xbox one. I'm seeing mixed results depending on the game to whether or not an SSD/SSHD makes any significant difference. Does anyone have any experience with either compared to stock? I'm not looking to spend $100 more than a normal drive if it only saves me 1-2 seconds on load times.

Thanks,

Picked up a 2TB external HDD from Amazon for $85. Love it!

No more worrying and trying to create space for games. Find HDD that suits you and go for it. I went with one of those small ones, about the size deck of cards. Fits right next to Xbox, not an eyesore.

Setting the HDD up was a breeze. Turn Xbox on. Plug HDD into USB slot. Confirm. Boom! Done.

traigusb14_ESO2

QuebraRegra wrote: »

I suspect the results would be imperceptible with this game... I think the limiting factor is the server.

Maybe more bandwidth, and a lower latency connection might help.

Where are these MEGA SERVERS geographically speaking for NS XBOX anyway?

I have a noticeable load time reduction in a lot of games (including zone times in ESO).

Probably Mid-East Coast. Pretty standard location area.

Soarin'

You need to determine what the speed of the memory bus is, then purchase an SSD or HDD to match, anything over the bottleneck is money wasted.