I used to have a 2TB external drive hooked up to the Xbox One. Games installed to that external drive actually loaded slightly faster than ones installed to the internal drive. Plus I never had to worry about room. Even after installing all kinds of games, including lots of freebies from GwG, I was never low on room.
However, since Wumpus was kind enough to give me his Corsair 240 GB SSD, I decided to use that as my external drive instead. First I deleted all the games off the old drive that I wasn’t actively playing. Then I transferred the rest to the internal drive. And then I took out the old 2TB drive from the casing and replaced it with the 240 GB SSD. I was a bit worried because officially the minimum size for a drive that will let you install games is supposed to be 256 GB. But I’d seen people on the Xbox Forum claim that their 240 and 250 GB drives also worked in some cases. So I plugged it in, the Xbox recognized it, formatted it, and I now use that as my external drive.
And wow, the difference is night and day. I moved my DOOM install over to the external drive and loaded up a level. The main menu now loads blazingly fast, and even loading up an entire level takes a fraction of the time now. The initial load times for a level used to be really long, but now are so short.
When I eventually buy the Season’s Pass for The Witcher 3, I’m looking forward to playing it off the SSD. That’s a game that used to take the longest to load on my Xbox One. I’m also looking forward to getting back into Fallout 4, since Digital Foundry found that an SSD not only improved load times but actually improved game performance on an Xbox One when installed on an SSD.
Now, granted, I have a lot less room this way, but I’m really happy with this speed boost, and prefer that to having more room on the drive. Thanks again @wumpus.
P.S. I haven’t yet decided what to do with the old 2TB drive yet. Use it in my PC for storing media, or replace my PS4’s internal hard drive with that one? I’ve never run out of room on the PS4 yet though, so I’m not sure if I need the extra room on that yet.