Curated DJ lessons

I've just bought and Xbox Series X, or rather I was scalped when buying one.
This isn't my first Xbox, I've had one of each since the initial Xbox Launch way back in the early 2,000's, and you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm a fan, I'm not. The longest I ever owned and Xbox for was around 6 months.

I've always preferred the PlayStation, but not this time, the PS5 looks like some sort of alien afterbirth from an aborted fetus. A bit of a disgusting description I know, but it matches my disgust of the PS5 design.

The Series X is a nice shape and size and it's a good fit on my desk. I do like the design too.

The only issue I have with the machine? The capacity of the internal SSD, at 1 TB it's woefully inadequate. But it gets worse, after the OS install and space is reserved for cache, screenshots and video clips, that drops to 800GB.

Now I also have a high-end PC, and I rarely use it for online games thanks to hackers, but my PC has more than enough storage for my needs, around 20TB with 4TB being SSD, and 2TB being NVMe SSD. So it's fast, quiet, and plentiful.

I also have spare, a 1TB SATA SSD, 500GB SATA SSD, 500GB NVMe SSD, and 250GB NVMe SSD. So the NVMe drives got installed to NVMe to USB caddies, and the 1TB SATA SSD to SATA to USB adapter.
Sadly it didn't go well with the caddies as they are USB-3, but cheap and a bit finicky about working at full USB speeds. The same USB cable that works fine on my desktop at 400MB per second, worked at 40MB per second on the Xbox.

So I gave the 1TB SATA drive a go, and it worked flawlessly once I formatted it for games. I use this as the SATA to USB adapter:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07F7WDZGT
I originally bought it (and a few extra) for the Raspberry Pi 4, and they've served me well.

The SSD I have is a Samsung 860 SATA 1TB, and after a little testing this is what I found.

MB=Megabytes, NOT MBs which means Megabits. Bits is 10 times slower than bytes

Xbox Games, they move to the external drive fine, and at around 400MB per second. Play's fine too!
Xbox 360 Games move and work at the same speed.
Xbox One games move and work at 400MB, like the two systems above.
Xbox Series X, again they move at 400MB, these play fine for now, I can only assume games in future may need a high speed NVMe, so I'll use the internal drive for these.

I can only estimate the transfer speed while the Xbox is reading the drive, I assume it's roughly the same speed as that's the limit of the USB sockets and chipset @400-450MB.

One thing I wasn't sure about was whether any of the new Series X games would play from the external drive, and surprise surprise, they all play fine. Now of course the Xbox doesn't have a game like the PS5 Ratchet and Clank, a game that has zero waiting for levels to load. Well, it might, I just haven't heard of one yet.
This might be a problem if a game(s) is ever released that works this way, but right now, it's not an issue.

So if you are already in need of a new drive, and lets face it, that Gold subscription could well and truly put you over the limit easily, then installing an external USB SSD isn't only easy, it's FAR cheaper than Microsoft/Seagate's option. Sure they're a lot tidier, but also a lot more expensive, especially as mine were laying around doing nothing.

Go into Settings
System
Storage Devices
Select system storage, see all, select move and move across all games/apps that will fit on the new drive... leave for a while and you're done.
All my games and apps are on the external SSD and it's still fine for space, even with CoD Warzone and Black Ops Cold war installed, and that's nearly 250GB combined!

Instead of giving Jeff Bezos all your money, throw some to your local computer shop, CCL online is my local and they're good too.
https://www.cclonline.com/category/718/ ... ves-SSDs-/

SSD longevity
SSD's will last a long long long time if you don't WRITE to them constantly. So try to only write to them as and when you really need too.
Reading doesn't wear them out.

To keep the SSD speeds up at the maximum possible speed, try to leave around 15%-20% space free. Don't FILL them to the brim.

If possible keep them cool too. Heat is ALWAYS bad for anything electronic, and SSD's can generate a fair amount of heat. This applies mostly to NVMe drives that can reach 80c. Fit them with a heatsink and try to keep air moving over them, so maybe place them on top of the series X where the fan is blowing out.

Why does writing wear out SSD's?
To write to an SSD you need to wipe the portion that will store the data. This is done with a small charge of electricity and switching the block from carrying data to a zero, and ready for data. Then it takes a little charge to write it and change it's state.

Do this often enough, and it wears out, like any moving part.

A good quality SSD and internal controller (on the drive) will do something called wear levelling. It will provision part of the drive away from the user, you will never see this, so don't worry about lost space. This provisioned part will then be written too when data is ready, and the other deleted part will become the provisioned portion.
This reduces wear and tear on the same portion of the drive, so instead of writing to the same part over and over again, the drive will write to as many different parts as often as possible.

This is why a full SSD is a slow SSD. The drive can't provision properly so it has to write to the same part over and over, and it takes longer to delete, blank or zero, and write.
The process is called "trim control". Most USB SSD controllers don't allow for it, so writing can be slow to these drives, but a good USB controller and drive controller, and it still should be at the theoretical maximum, like mine is!

Reading is fine, as it only pulls data from the cell and doesn't change anything. So fill it up once and it should last a seriously long time.
Write constantly to the drive... and it WILL wear out and eventually die.