Best gaming console external hard drives

New cutting-edge video game content is released continuously and we want to own and play them all. Unfortunately, our humble consoles can only handle so much. Once upon a time this meant embarking on the nightmarish hard drive purge – what game do we delete to make room for our latest release? What’s worse is that some of the most exciting releases will require us to delete upwards of three games to make way for its immense worlds and 4K graphics.

Luckily, there’s another way, courtesy of Seagate. Seagate’s Game Drive series is a range of external hard drives specifically designed and configured for use with your Xbox One or Sony PS4. The drive used in the Game Drive is calibrated for quick access memory, rather than traditional external drives which are calibrated to archive files, which leads to a slower read rates. This ins't a problem for file back-ups, but for gaming where speed is key, they simply don’t cut it. The hard drive is attached to the console via a USB 3.0 connection, which offers a super high-speed rate of data transfer, 10 times faster than a standard USB plug. The calibrated drive and super-fast USB mean that the Game Drive operates exactly like the consoles internal hard drive, with no lag and a super-high performance.

Seagate hasn't only worked to make these PS4 and Xbox One external hard drives console-optimised, but simple to set up. The plug-and-play feature means that once the device is hooked up, the console recognises the device and its purpose, and takes you through a quick guided set-up process, which take roughly three minutes. After which, you’re free to use your console as normal.

A real benefit to social gamers is that the external hard drive can be taken to a friend’s place and hooked into their console, allowing you to access all of your digital content on another system. In the new frontier of diskless and digital gaming, this is a real boon. Additionally, those who own the Xbox One All-Digital Console will find relief in having such a huge memory readily available.

The Seagate Game Drive comes in a range divided into two, PS4 external hard drives and Xbox One external hard drives. You can get yourself either 2TB or 4TB of extra memory, depending on your need. We’ve got a list of what’s on offer.

Please note: The content volumes listed below are based on average sizes. Actual content stored will vary user to user. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2 will take up 99GB from a disk and 150GB all-digital on PS4, and 107GB on Xbox One. Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 download size is 51GB on the PS4 and 46GB for the Xbox One.