SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD, USB-C USB 3.2 Gen 2, External NVMe Solid State Drive up to 1050 MB/s IP65 rated for dust and water resistance

Product Information

The best external drives for Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S 1. Toshiba Canvio Flex 2TB: Best value HDD for Xbox Series consoles While Toshiba sells a gaming-specific version of its Canvio external HDD, the Canvio Flex is the current king when it comes to price, performance and value. It’s cheaper than most competitors, yet also one of the fastest portable HDDs we’ve tested. Our PC benchmarks place its sequential read/write speeds over a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A connection at 151.5MB/sec and 158.9MB/sec, and there’s precious little in it between the Canvio Flex and Canvio Gaming when it comes to random read/write speeds. Plugged into the Xbox Series X, it’s very competitive with the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hard Drive, taking four seconds longer to load a saved game in Prey, but coming first by just under three seconds in Red Dead Redemption 2. You can also save a minute or so over slower drives when it comes to moving or copying installed games. Sure, it’s nowhere near as speedy as an SSD, but if you just want a drive for archiving Series S/X games and playing your old Xbox One favourites, this could be all you need.

To give you an idea of how much more space you’ll want to buy for your Switch games, the must-have Animal Crossing: New Horizons takes up around 7GB of memory storage, while Metroid Dread uses about 4.5GB of storage. If you're only planning on playing two or three games at a time and fully completing them, a smaller card is probably all you need, but if you want lots of games ready to play at any time, then a larger card is more convenient. We see better performance from the 1TB Extreme but it’s still far short of the rated 2,000 IOPS for an A2-rated card. The fault likely lies in the phone hardware. Is the 1TB SanDisk Extreme worth it? We run two sets of tests when we’re looking at external hard drives for the Xbox Series S and Series X. First, we connect them to a PC and run the CrystalDiskMark benchmark to test their raw sequential and random read/write speeds. Sequential speeds are an indication of how fast the drive can read or write large quantities of data in one sustained burst, which makes a big difference when you’re first running a game, loading a saved game, streaming in all the models and textures in a level, or transferring a game from one drive to another. Random read/write speeds cover smaller data transfers, and make an impact when you’re running a game directly from the hard drive. Approximations: Results and Full HD (1920x1080) video support may vary based on host device, file attributes, and other factors. Blazing transfer speeds lets you offload cards fast. Use with the SanDisk® MobileMate® USB 3.0 microSD™ card reader 6 to achieve up to 150MB/s speeds 2.

Give your Xbox a serious storage boost with the best external SSDs and HDDs and plug-in expansion cards

An added benefit, of course, is that the Seagate Storage Expansion Card is also extremely fast, and we were able to transfer the entire 104.6GB Red Dead Redemption 2 file in less than three minutes during our tests. If you’ve got the money, and you’re fast approaching the upper limits of your Xbox’s internal storage, then there’s simply no better external storage option at the moment. UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) designates a performance option designed to support real-time video recording with UHS-enabled host devices. Video Speed Class 30 (V30), sustained video capture rate of 30MB/s, designates a performance option designed to support real-time video recording with UHS-enabled host devices. See www.sdcard.org/consumers/speed. See Western Digital White Paper- Flash 101 and Flash Management. A detailed overview of flash and flash management (August 2018): https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/collateral/white-paper/white-paper-sandisk-flash101-management.pdf

For 64GB-1TB: A2 performance is 4000 read IOPS, 2000 write IOPS. For 32GB: A1 performance is 1500 read IOPS, 500 write IOPS. Results may vary based on host device, app type, and other factors.As our benchmarks have shown, the 1TB SanDisk Extreme is stupidly big and stupidly fast. The big question is whether all this brawn is worth it. We used the MSRP of the 1TB card (we couldn’t find it on sale yet) and compared it to the street price of the two other cards in this review. On a per-gigabyte basis, the SanDisk 400GB Ultra card is a lot more affordable than the SanDisk 1TB Extreme card. Of course, the Extreme is much, much faster. IDG A new SD card is just one way in which you could improve your experience playing on Nintendo Switch. For other ideas, consider visiting our guides to the best Nintendo Switch accessories, the best Nintendo Switch controllers, the best Nintendo Switch carry cases, or the best Nintendo Switch headsets. There are some cosmetic reasons to go for the FireCuda Gaming Hard Drive, not least that it comes in a range of different designs featuring classic Xbox heroes and Marvel and Star Wars fan favourites. Like the FireCuda SSD, it also has a cool illuminated bar on the front edge that flashes when the drive is busy. Yet the real reason to pay a little extra is that its performance is very good. On paper, the Toshiba Canvio Flex has faster sequential read/write speeds, while its random read/write speeds aren’t far behind. In practice, though, we found the FireCuda slightly faster to load some games and two or three seconds faster when loading save games, although the Toshiba had the edge on Prey. The difference isn’t that significant, but if you like the styling then this drive won’t let you down when it comes to performance.

Again: We probably can’t blame the card, as we’ve been told the SnapDragon 845 (and probably the 855) chip doesn’t even support the A2 spec anyway. It’s also possible the actual memory card readers in phones are to blame. In short, if you think A2 will get you better application performance on your Android phone, it won’t be as fast as using internal memory. IDGCompatible device required. Full HD (1920x1080) and 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) support may vary based upon host device, file attributes, and other factors. See www.sandisk.com/HD Comparison based on internal testing of SanDisk Extreme® microSDXC™ UHS-l card, versus current UHS-l cards with 100MB/s stated performance. Results may vary based on host device, file attributions, and other factors. Up to 150MB/s read speed, engineered with proprietary technology to reach speeds beyond UHS-I 104MB/s, require compatible devices capable of reaching such speed. Write speeds lower. Based on internal testing; performance may be lower depending on host device, interface, usage conditions, and other factors. 1MB=1,000,000 bytes. You want something officially licensed: If you would rather have peace of mind then and officially licensed card could be a better choice. Rated A1 3, the SanDisk Ultra® microSD™ card is optimized for apps usage. It delivers faster app launch and overall app usage performance that in turn provides a better smartphone experience.