Hard drives (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Saturday, September 08, 2018, 01:56 (2345 days ago) @ stabbim

I've heard people talking about getting a SSD to help with load times. Is this true? And if so, do people have some suggestions for on the cheap SSD's for an Xbox? Is it that difficult to set it up?

Something about the way this is phrased makes me think you're asking about internal drives? If so, I have no input on that, except that it's not necessary. USB3 is easily fast enough to take advantage of an SSD upgrade. Just get one of those and be done with it.

I will add that my personal opinion is that SSD speed is nice if you can afford it, but the cost per GB makes it not a great option for most. I'd have to lay out WAY more money than I'm comfortable with in order to get something that would actually hold all my currently installed games. But if you don't keep much installed locally, or are rich, go for it. :)

Every few months, Newegg (or stores like them) have a 1TB SSD on sale for $150. Yes, that's 3x the price of a standard HD... but the extra $100 is, say, 25 cups of Starbucks. For me, definitely worth it. (Way, way, WAY faster for booting up, for starting the game, for loading into content... one of these days I should run a test with someone with a standard drive, and calculate how much time the SSD saves me over the course of, say, a month.)

Setup is also trivial; as you say, running it as an external drive (Amazon sells completely functional 2.5" enclosures with USB3 for $10) means almost no setup at all. (One of these days I'll take on the chore of putting it inside; would make things more portable. But that's really not very important.)