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Having seen the worthwhile results of SSD and hybrid drive upgrades on PlayStation 4, it's now Xbox One's turn in the test seat. With its stock 5,400rpm drive turning in loading times of well over a minute in certain titles - such as Just Cause 3 and Grand Theft Auto 5 - Microsoft's machine thankfully has plenty of options to speed up the downtime. One of its trump cards is the ability to connect to any external drive via USB 3.0, making the upgrade path much more fluid than it is on PS4. That is, provided you have one specific tool for the job.Now, it's possible to buy an external SSD and be done with it - but there's a more affordable path to the same results. For all our tests below, we rely on a simple USB enclosure device that costs in the region of £10-15, allowing us to connect any spare 2.5 inch laptop drive you like to the console. As long as it has a SATA interface, you can even slot in SSD or hybrid drives, and this combo comes in at a significantly lower price. Once connected, there's no lengthy 'backup and restore' process on Xbox One either; you simply copy a game over from the internal to the attached drive, and reap the rewards in faster read speeds.
As a test process, this has made putting this article together much easier than on PS4, but the key hardware is otherwise the same. As before, we're pitting the Xbox One stock drive against a 1TB Seagate hybrid SSHD that relies on a small cache of fast NAND memory to boost access speeds, coming in at around £70. As an upgrade option it doubles the storage space over the console's standard 500GB drive, but also vies for read and write speeds with to a pricey SSD. To show the real deal at work though, we also have a full-fledged OCZ Trion 100 drive that falls around the £100 mark for its 480GB model.
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