Gamers are quite aware that their game libraries are limited to the amount of space on their hard drives. What if I were to tell you that there was a way to remove that limit? I don’t have any red or blue pills, however, Seagate has an answer for this.
Name: Seagate Game Drive Hub for Xbox
Manufacturer: Seagate Technology
Price: $199.99 | Amazon
Release Date: June 11, 2017
The Game Drive Hub for Xbox is an 8TB beast of a hard drive. This thing is HUGE, and I don’t just mean in terms of hard drive space. The Game Drive Hub can potentially hold over 200 Xbox One games within its 7.2TB storage capacity. Yes, while it is advertised as an 8TB drive, approximately 800GB is reserved for the file system, typical of most hard drives to begin with. The hub also comes with two USB 3.0 ports in the front, so you can connect other peripherals to your Xbox One, giving you a total of 5 USB 3.0 ports. This, of course, assuming that you don’t already have a USB 3.0 hub attached to the Xbox One already. The drive takes up quite a bit of space, measuring 8 in x 1.6 in x 4.7 inch. Like I said, it’s a big drive. One thing to note is that the Game Drive Hub is powered by AC power.
As with any peripheral on the Xbox One, once you plug it into your console, it will ask for you to leave it pre-formatted for media or to format it for game storage. For the purposes of this review, I formatted the drive for game storage.
Performance wise, it doesn’t match up to the Game Drive for Xbox SSD, however, there is a slight bump up in comparison to the Game Drive for Xbox HDD. The additional 2oMB/s read rate does equate to slightly faster read rates from the Game Hub, but compared to the SSD, it’s significantly slower, and it shows. Much like in my review of the Game Drive for Xbox SSD, install time difference for the Game Drive Hub for Xbox are negligible. Where the real difference lies is the load times. For instance, take the following into consideration from my previous Seagate review:
Forza Horizon 3…The game loads significantly faster, taking 23 seconds from initial “press A to advance” to your garage.
Twenty-three seconds. That’s about 20% of the time that the internal drive takes to load Forza Horizon 3. The Game Drive Hub takes 48 seconds to get there, double of what the Game Drive SSD offers, but still 20% faster than the internal drive. Taking an Xbox 360 title into consideration, let’s look at Red Dead Redemption. On the Game Drive SSD, from menu to game took 16 seconds, as opposed to the internal HDD’s 23 seconds. With the Game Drive Hub, the load time was only one second longer than the Game Drive SSD, clocking in at 17 seconds. That’s impressive to say the very least. Overall, you will see performance gains when it comes to loading your games on the Game Drive Hub as opposed to your internal drive.
*This Seagate Game Drive for Xbox SSD was provided to us by Seagate Technology for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please go review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.
Summary
The Seagate Game Drive Hub for Xbox does a lot of things good, but it gets one thing near perfect. The ability to offer more than 7TB of game storage space for digital libraries could be considered a godsend. Typically, a 500GB or 1TB fills up pretty fast, but with the Game Drive Hub, I highly doubt that people will have that issue in such a rapid fashion. As for those whose libraries aren’t so big, the portability aspect, along with the ability to connect two accessories for one port is beyond useful for those multiplayer sessions. All in all, it’s not the Xbox Game Drive SSD, but it has its place in the ecosystem, and it fits like a glove.
