Series S storage is like playing Tetris.

i didn't know the price was still so bad for the storage expansion. i helped my stepdad recently upgrade my sister's ps5 with a m.2 drive and he was shocked at the price difference between a storage upgrade for that and a Series console. proprietary storage expansion should not exist btw, i worked on Squadrons, glad to see you've enjoyed it!

It appears obvious that seagate has some exclusivity contract with Microsoft for these drives. If that were to end, I am sure we would start seeing much less expensive options. There is no reason for them to lower the price since they have no competition.

If you set up your USB (HDD or SSD) drive as the default storage device, it'll automatically install USB-drive-compatible games to it. Works for me with the listed games.

This was inevitably going to be a problem for Xbox at some point. While I do appreciate the advantages of a portable expansion card. They need to keep the price more in line with the market.

I didn’t realize that this wasn’t more widely known. I’ve been managing my games like this since Day-1 on my Series X. It’s super nice for MCC.

When I remember correctly: The patched versions of Assassins Creed Origins and Odyssey are also called X|S title but can be run from an external drive.

Most of these games are older games that received patches to run enhanced on the series consoles but don't take full advantage of the new architecture. For me I set the default installation location on external harddrive, if the game requires ssd it will tell you before downloading.

Halo MCC can run off USB storage which is great considering how big that game is.

Yeah it's been fun moving back and forth my games lol! Thanks for the heads up MVG.😎👍

MS had a missed opportunity when designing the series S & X to add faster USB ports, Sony has them on the PS5, including type C. The Xbox does a speed test on portable drives to make sure they are fast enough to play xbox games, they should of just added another level to the speed test that enables series S/X game installs.

All games should be downloadable and playable on external hard drives. It’s 2024 smh

Yes, I have been running many Xbox One enhanced games from an external 2 TB SSD that I bought back in December 2020 with my Xbox Series X after finding out that these Gen9Aware games don't have to run from the internal storage. This includes the Halo Master Chief Collection which is over 100 GB, I think. I use the internal storage and 2 TB expansion for native Xbox Series games. The same is also true for the PS5 which can also run enhanced PS4 games from external storage. I have a 4 TB Crucial X6 SSD for all my PS4 games. It's only native apps that need to run from the internal drives on both systems. Still, I wish that we had more flexibility of where to install native PS5 and Xbox Series X games because I am pretty sure that games like FIFA 23 and NBA 2K23 don't need to run from an internal SSD as I can install those games to an external SATA3 SSD on my PC and the loading times are actually as quick and sometimes quicker than the native versions on my PS5. Having this option would mean that the internal and expansion NVMe storage could be reserved for those games that DO need the faster storage.

The fact that you can tell the difference in file types from the UI is a small but nice win for me.

I knew about this already so it's always nice to see someone with a lot of followers spreading the word about it so more people could know.

I've known about this since early 2021 and I've tried to let as many people know about it as I can on Twitter. Glad you're bringing light to this. One thing I noticed was the X/S games that do work on the Series consoles are mostly the smart delivered games from last generation.

THX!! Very useful information, have always loved and valued your channel’s content!

Your title was exactly what I have been wanting to know. Thank you for uploading this video

I found out about this in 2020, kinda surprised you hadnt heard about it until recently, since your channel is probably the most technical one I follow lol.

I’m so glad you covered this I noticed that master chief collection could still be played off a HDD back when the next gen patch came out

I've been running Mass Effect Legendary Edition on an external USB drive on my Series X since the game released, as well as a few other "Series X/S optimised" games. Durango Gen9 Aware titles are just Xbox One games compiled with the Xbox One SDK but have a little bit of extra code that allow them to detect when they're running on a Series X/S, hence Gen9 Aware. They can use that knowledge to make changes in how they behave on the faster hardware - typically graphical settings like removing a 30fps cap, adding extra video modes like performance/quality etc that don't appear when run on an XBox One. But it's still an Xbox One game running in backward compatibility mode. It gets some benefit from the raw increase in processing power but can't use any of the new features like ray tracing, velocity engine, etc, the latter being why it is allowed to run on an external drive. Many cross gen games were Gen9 Aware before Microsoft even added the "Series X/S optimised" overlay on game icons in the store and game library, and you've always been able to check the file info to see this as demonstrated in the video. Where things got confusing is when Microsoft added that "Series X/S optimised" logo on our games - and decided to use the same "optimised" logo for both Gen9 Aware titles - which could run on an external drive - and true next gen titles compiled with the GDK, which can't. They really should have called it "Series X/S enhanced" for these half way titles and reserved "Series X/S optimised" for games compiled with the GDK for Scarlett hardware IMHO, this would have avoided the confusion. Many games have changed from backward compatible Durango Gen9 Aware titles to GDK Scarlett titles with an update - three I can think of off the top of my head are Doom 2016, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order and The Witcher 3 - all of these updates added raytracing modes and thus required a new GDK build of the game that is not backward compatible to access the raytracing features. All of these I had installed on an external drive prior to the updates, when the updates came out the Xbox slipstreaming automatically downloaded and installed the entire new build of the game onto my internal storage without asking, filling the drive, and left the old Durango Gen9 Aware versions on the external drive which I had to manually delete! So having these Gen9 Aware titles on an external drive is nice but does risk them getting automatically installed onto internal storage in the future if the developer ever updates them to be a proper next gen build.... I share MVG's disappointment with the price of the official nvme modules - my Series X is now a bit over 2 years old and I checked just a few days ago to see what the price of the 1TB official storage addon is now and it's still the same as ever - way too expensive.

Excellent summary of this topic, really enjoyed the video as always ❤

Thanks for the Video MVG. It's great to let everyone know about these findings. Unlike me who purchased 2 1TB and 1 2TB Seagate Drives. This will help everyone a lot

I agree with you 100%, the price of the storage is way too expensive and not allowing any other companies to make them so Seagate have the monopoly is very anti consumer

The reddit thread covers pretty much every title to date, except maybe Far Cry 5, which has now native next gen 60 fps patch and it's using this exact approach - it's Gen9Aware and could be ran from external SSD/HDD no problem.

A good way to take advantage of this is to set your external drive as the primary install location. Then you will get a warning if the game has to be installed to internal storage when you go to download it instead of having to manually check afterwards.

Another quality MVG video with interesting information. I wonder though, what's behind the blurred out section? What sort of secrets has MVG got going on!

so here is the funny part about all this 'expansion' situation. WD is who supplies MS with the internal SSD for the Series line. And they were granted a license to release their own expansion cards but for some reason they just have not done that. They were said to have sizes ranging from 256gb (yeah smaller than internal SS storage) up to 4tb. Seagate only recently offered other sizes like 512gb and 2tb and Im not sure when their contract is up but I hope soon. More makers releasing licensed cards is better for consumers.

Thanks for the tip, I've been swapping games from an external drive to the internal for the past year. I did recently notice that on some optimized games that were on the external did not have the two arrows on the bottom right handle side of the thumbnail and I thought that was weird specifically on watchdogs Legion.

Microsoft pulled a Sony with a proprietary memory card. One reason the vita got hurt

Interesting information. My nephew gonna love hearing this. Thank you so much~

Great channel bro!

I noticed this as well when I was transferring some games and didn’t get the warning it wouldn’t play on my WD Black spinner. Makes sense since some of these games are quite small and/or don’t require much storage throughput to run.

thanks for the reddit. your the goat!!

Nice Speedball T 👊 Brutal Deluxe was one of my favourite games back on the Amiga

I’d love to see an OFFICIAL XBOX storage expansion slot dongle that would connect to a fast NVME … that would give consumers choice.

Solid info, thanks for sharing!

I was quite surprised when my Xbox 360 and Xbox One games on a external HHD also has the quick resume function, I thought this was only available for games on the SSD.

Good on you for raising awareness. I've lost count of the number of times I've pointed this out to people, only to be told I was mistaken.

I was happy to see a couple Series X consoles out in the wild yesterday ready to purchase. Only took about 2.5 years.

Great info. Good video. Thanks

Cool! Guess what I am going to go do next? :) Love this channel!

I like the bug where if you use the expansion card sometimes your network adapters don't work at all until removal, sweet solution

I discovered MCC being compatible with my external hard drive by accident and looked up the same list of games you showed.

Nice video. I still use an external hard drive and play older games off that. Move newer stuff there if I need the room. It would be nice to expand if your playing say lots of CODs and Battlefields here and there but it’s not a must.

Great tip! I was able to move MCC over to my HDD and free up 120gb on my internal. Also, Seagate isn't the issue, it's MS. Remember the 360? Until we unlocked the partitioning for the HDD, we were stuck with their proprietary storage options too. They just love to keep hardware locked down.

@Modern Vintage Gamer there were some significant sales (at least here in the US) for the 1 and 2 terabyte expansion cards during the last 2 months of 2022. In regard to the games you mentioned optimized for Series S/X that can be stored and run from a usb hard drive, are you sure they’re running with Series S/X optimizations and not Xbox One X optimizations? I’d be curious to know for certain wether or not these games run more optimized off the NVMe or perform the same off a usb hard drive. Thanks

I have seen CF express to M.2 nvme adapters are out in the wild but it seems they don't work anymore, I would love the homebrew community to come up with a way to use these reliably if that is even possible

really useful info, thanks for sharing! (installs ME:LE on the external HDD)

I was aware that various games could be played from external storage, but that has been via trial-and-error. Thanks for this tip in looking at the file info for verification.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU this video is a God send!

Were you using a ssd or mechanical hdd external USB drive when conducting these tests?. Thanks for this video!, for me it has been a nuance I’m willing to still put up with vs paying for the still overpriced expansion card with moving the games I want to play in and out of an external USB drive into internal memory, but was curious if by any chance loading and running performance so how might be better in an external Ssd

Ermm KZfaq.. I am subscribed and have ALL notifications set to on, on this channel. How come I am seeing this a day late?!?!?

I noticed that long ago, that some labelled Xbox Series games can run on a slower drive. However it does seem like only games that have received a 60fps patch with their Series label work on slower drives (AC Origins / Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider...). In these, apparantly, no further Series optimizations were made. They got the Series label while not technically being true Series versions. Ori being the exception.

You are a life saver - I was getting really pissed off having to manage my downloads, especially when coming across games that are why larger than you think they would be - just two examples being Persona 4 & 5. Playground Games really need to sort out the optimisation for Forza 4 & 5 too

That Reddit thread is how I found out about this tip. Due to the insane prices of the expansion drives, my Series X hasn't been touched in months and have been putting more time into the PS5 and Steam Deck, thanks to the prices of 2TB 2280s and 1TB 2230s dropping.

It was widely known, bro. Seen some reddit topics on that also;) My first game that I could run from USB HDD was the AC Origins after the patch, if I remember correctly.

Thank you for this 🙏

Great video! I'd take slower load times if it meant I can run them on external.

So durango and scarlett, gotcha 👍👍👍 this is a HUGE help. Every series X/S owner needs to know this!

It's because of Gen9Aware games that I preferred the old way to manage storage. Before you could set the external as the default installation location for games and would be prompted for any GDK games to install internally while gen9aware would install and play just fine. Now I need to micromanage the games to best make use of my storage

The newer X/S enhanced games that can still be played from the exernal - AC Odyssey and Origins, Far Cry 5, Sniper Elite 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider... those just off the top of my head.

Assassins creed origins Desperados III Farcry 5 Skyrim Halo MCC Mass effect trilogy Shadow of the tomb raider State of decay 2 Ghost recon breakpoint. And more can all be ran from external storage. If you don't want to check the file info you can simply move your games to an external drive, then filter on external drive and series x, if a game doesn't have the "left & right" arrows in the bottom right of game tile it can be played from external storage

I knew this was the case for master chief collection but was not aware that there was a bunch of other titles s/x titles that could also be ran this way. This is good to know though.

Nice video. Thank you.

Seems like it might have to do with game asset and texture streaming etc. whether these games take advantage of it or not. The idea would be that there could be issues with gameplay so instead of bad PR they put limitations. It also makes sense to say “Series titles can’t be installed to external storage” for all games the Series name to avoid people complaining that their game doesn’t support it.

If you don't have to move a game from usb storage, that's great. Less read / writes to a drive the better. This is a list to keep an eye on.

That's good news! Great to save internal storage space for Series S/X only games while putting all Xbox One stuff in a cheaper external drive. Just be aware that the bottleneck speed in loading games, even on an SSD, is the USB port so that's why MS made a "proprietary" port which hooks directly to the mother board for speed.

I noticed this with the Master Chief collection and Sea of thieves about a year ago. I think Shadow of the tomb raider also works off usb storage as well.

Even with the 1TB of internal storage on the Series X it still fills up too fast. I expected by this point Seagate would no longer have the exclusivity but as time goes on it seems like they're going to remain the only partner. I might go the rout of a CF express adapter but haven't really looked into if there's performance losses or not. I feel like they might not be using all the PCI lanes on some of those adapters.

Off topic maybe the anbernic rg 350 charge wire/cable works on the Xbox Series S controller, so no more batteries (maybe that's old news?) just thought you would like to know. Great video!

How long ago was this video recorded? Not that it's a huge deal because it's still great information and it's helping a lot of people. Buy both my Xbox files and the reddit post look different than shown in this video. Might just be a me thing tho, not by any means upset just found it interesting.

If the Xbox platform wasn't a DRM hell box, I would upgrade to a Series X. But having no internet and being blocked from games I paid for is absolutely ridiculous*. However, this is cool news to hear*. This was another reason why I haven't moved on from Xbox one x due to the storage options. On my One X, I have 5TB total and I never needed to worry about space. But man, it's a real pain to have to delete and reinstall games like crazy. Really looking forward to them HOPEFULLY fixing this in time.... Or just Go PC and PS5. Lol

Found this out by accident with Halo MCC last weekend. Honestly after going from a One X with an SSD upgrade to my Series S, the load times are WAY better and I'm fine with the limitation

One thing to note is another of these games do offer cloud gaming so there's no need to install if you've got a solid internet connection, this does help big time on storage

The linked reddit post is old and not being updated. Best to just check for yourself by going to manage game and then to file info to see if it's gen9 or just gen9aware.

I can confirm this. I had a old 10 TB Seagate external HDD from last gen. I noticed that some game forced me to install to the internal but games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead 2 would run just fine off the external

I noticed this with halo mcc and assassins creed origins. Glad to know how to find them.

Coincidentally, I just discovered this because of the Far Cry 5 next-gen update - I had it installed on external storage and it automatically updated to the X/S version and runs without any problems, to my surprise.

One thing that thoroughly annoyed me was when Forza Horizon 4 got an update that made it go from something that ran just fine on external storage to requiring running from internal. And there was no way to refuse the update or force it to use the Xbox One version, as far as I could tell.

This is huge. My series x and 1tb card have been full for some time but I have plenty of space on my 4tb external hdd. I’ll be moving some over asap.

The PS5 does do something similar by having patches that increase resolution and framerate but they are still playable on an external drive. I think that they probably label them as Series applications if they are just mere patches like this and not separate applications.

Whats with the weird frame glitch at the bottom? at 6:52 to 6:53

That is interesting, even though it would make sense that Xbox One games would be able to run from USB, I didn't realize that Microsoft were implying that they wouldn't work. I guess they wanted to mask the differences between Gen9 aware executable and native Gen 9 ones to make it more consistent for users. I 100% agree that both Microsoft and Sony should allow developers to opt out of the NVMe requirement for native Gen 9 games that won't necessarily take advantage of the tech. It would be a big win for the end user. (Small nitpick, M.2 is a _physical_ form factor. What Xbox memory cards do have in common with the M.2 drives you'd use in a PS5 is that they use the NVMe protocol.)

So when can we expect the next MVG room tour?

I have been running around saying this since I got my Series S in 2021 and connected an external SSD to it. Glad you're covering it and giving it more exposure because I always grab my head when I see people forking out the big bucks for Microsoft's expensive Seagate Expansion.

could you explain to me why fight night round 3 isn't backward compatible on xbox series s?

This definitely will be handy on finding space.

I’m at a point where I only really play forza horizon 5 and mw3. I CANNOT have both on internal and play them. I’d have to to transfer each one back and forth I I want to play the other :/. What do I do

Is there anywhere to check whether an app is durango or scarlet-native before you buy?

Noticed this recently with the Goldeneye relaunch. Even though it's optimised for X|S, it runs off external

Reminds me of players installing mods for Knights of The Old Republic on their original xBoxes...I wonder if this could be used for installing new apps and whatnot, for development purposes?

MVG what happened to yout SoundCloud channel with amazing Amigo mixes

I've noticed this since before Christmas for the Xbox series X games I have that's working on the game drive is conon exiles and state of decay 2 and crypt of the sepent king

I have an idea. If someone could compare these XS optimised games if they were installed on PC with similar specs but installed on Sata drive that would give a good estimate how it would run on XSX external drive. I wonder how it would go.

I have noticed this, farcry 5 and Vermintide 2 are ones I can think of off the top of my head

also, there needs to be a list of the games you can install externally that are Series Optimized. any links?

I think the games that have the arrows icon are ones that will only run on the internal storage or an expansion card. But one thing I do is by default install everything to my external hard drive and move them to my internal when i'm going to play it. I'm one that doesn't play many different games in a short period of time so moving a game to the internal isn't a huge deal for me.

I play the rhythm game DJ Max Respect V and it runs perfectly on an external hard drive as well. Good thing too since the game is pretty large.

I used to be able to download backwards compatible games directly to the external storage but now it seems that they have removed the option. Am I missing something?