Question for you smarter fellas...

So I'm going to assume the hard drive in the XB1 will be slower than top of the line HDD's that you can get for PC's.

Question is...if I were to get an external SSD drive with USB 3.0 connection would that be slower or faster than the drive installed in the XB1?  I know internal SSD's are much faster, but I am not educated on the difference in speeds between USB 3.0 and an regular internal hard drive and we are not allowed to swap out HDD's in the XB1

Performance will be worse with an external SSD over USB 3.0

I'm not sure exactly what kind of sata cable is used inside the XB1, but any modern sata cable has significantly better performance than USB 3.0

An SSD might have faster speeds than the HDD that the XB1 is using, but going over USB 3.0 will negate that. Also, using USB instead of sata is going to cause a pretty significant drop in CPU performance.

AtrumX wrote:Performance will be worse with an external SSD over USB 3.0

I'm not sure exactly what kind of sata cable is used inside the XB1, but any modern sata cable has significantly better performance than USB 3.0

An SSD might have faster speeds than the HDD that the XB1 is using, but going over USB 3.0 will negate that. Also, using USB instead of sata is going to cause a pretty significant drop in CPU performance.

Excellent, thanks for the feedback.  I don't know why, I just figured I'd ask for when I get the XB1.  So in other words, it would always be best to keep anything you plan on actually playing/running on the internal drive and if you run out of space just go buy a normal external drive with the USB 3.0 connection.

AtrumX wrote:Performance will be worse with an external SSD over USB 3.0

I'm not sure exactly what kind of sata cable is used inside the XB1, but any modern sata cable has significantly better performance than USB 3.0

An SSD might have faster speeds than the HDD that the XB1 is using, but going over USB 3.0 will negate that. Also, using USB instead of sata is going to cause a pretty significant drop in CPU performance.

 
agreed with atrum 

SSD are great if there internal    and just as slow as a HHD using usb....  now if they had some sort of hot swap  like some pc cases have then it would be epic win

Don't forget cloud storage. You can even do that now.

Yeah, I would only use an external drive for more "static" media. Movies, music, etc will all be perfectly fine on there. Also, any older games, XBL games, etc will all be fine on an external. There are those big RPGs that max out consoles. Then there are shooters that have such massive amounts of objects and players that they bog down. There are plenty of games out there that would be fine on an external drive. I just would put any super-massive AAA titles on one.
But hey, this early in the console life cycle you might be able to get away with it and not see a visible performance drop. No harm in trying it once if you already have the external drive!