My Xbox Series X is not formatting my external HDD...

[Invincible Sugar]

Hi! I bought a WD 20 TB external USB 3.0 HDD for my Xbox Series X. It was on sale for $310 which seemed great for what should be all the storage my Xbox will ever need...

 

But it's not formatting for games properly. The Xbox recognizes it, shows it has 18.2 TB free after formatting, and prompts me to select use for media or games. Media works just fine, so I don't think the Xbox has an issue addressing 20 TB on a single drive. When I select format for games it takes me through all the steps, it doesn't throw any errors, but it doesn't work. The drive does not show up after the prompts. Any advice?

 

Video of what happens:

 

 

Thanks in advance for your guidance!

[ioWesty]

the series x has issues formatting HDD for game storages cause it wants there custom ssd shit, and also try install something then select it, also delete some stuff of Internal storage

[Invincible Sugar]

22 minutes ago, ioWesty said:

the series x has issues formatting HDD for game storages cause it wants there custom ssd shit, and also try install something then select it, also delete some stuff of Internal storage

Hmm, I'm not sure if I understand. What would I need to do to format it? I can't install or move games to it right now as it doesn't appear as an option without being formatted for games first.

[ioWesty]

you would have to connect it to a PC to format it theres a full list made by microsoft on how to do so

[Invincible Sugar]

47 minutes ago, ioWesty said:

you would have to connect it to a PC to format it theres a full list made by microsoft on how to do so

Oh I see, ok! Format it as an Xbox drive on a PC then plug it into the Xbox. Would that be FAT32 or is there a special Xbox format?

 

EDIT: I should clerify, I've tired Googling this and found FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS so I don't know...

[jayjester]

did you find a fix? I have the same problem but cant find a fix.

[Invincible Sugar]

6 hours ago, jayjester said:

did you find a fix? I have the same problem but cant find a fix.

No, and funny enough just today I gave up on it. A few months ago I bought a 4 TB USB 3.1 SSD to use for Xbox ONE games and to store Series games I'm not playing right now. Today I reformatted the 20 TB HDD to dump my iPhone 15 ProRes footage to after I filled the 4 TB ssd I got for it in just 2 days...

[demonix00]

It's possible that the console can't handle drives with that much available storage (I know it works with HDDs as I used a 500GB external USB3 HDD on a series S for xbox one, back compat games and any series stuff that will run from an external USB drive) or it just chokes when trying to format a drive of that capacity (just FYI, the partition type used can't be read by windows).

 

IMHO I wouldn't recommend using spinning rust drives for extra storage on current gen consoles as it just causes problems and I'm not referring to the load speed difference (I can't play Ori and the blind forest on my xbox one S because it locks up at the title screen after pressing a button on the controller and causes the console to shut down (the same happens on the series S if it's run from an external mechanical drive, but I didn't wait for the forced power down to happen) and the series version of stellaris will crash to the home screen after a while playing when it is run from an external mechanical drive and this is one of the series games that can be run from an external USB drive).

[Invincible Sugar]

7 hours ago, demonix00 said:

It's possible that the console can't handle drives with that much available storage

Yeah, I think this is the issue sadly.

 

7 hours ago, demonix00 said:

IMHO I wouldn't recommend using spinning rust drives for extra storage on current gen consoles as it just causes problems and I'm not referring to the load speed difference

Well, I don't plan on playing games directly off the HDD unless they're like, old 360 games. The real goal is to download local copies of all my installs for games and keep the ones I play less often on external storage to move back and forth with internal, not to play them off it. My internet is very slow by today's standards, often slower than 5 Mbps down. So I don't wanna be deleting and re-downloading games all the time. I'd rather archive them on external storage and swap them with internal.

 

At the moment I have a 4 TB SSD plugged in for directly playing One series games off of, as well as 360. This is working for now. But long term I will need a lot more space. I might just get a few 12 TB HDD's and use those? Or whatever the largest known working volume is. With a hub I could plug in more than one HDD, and keep the SSD direct into the console.