Perform Xbox One S Hard Drive Upgrade Safely - Two Practical Ways

Quick Navigation:

• Xbox One S Overview and Size Limits

• Two Ways to Upgrade Xbox One S Internal Hard Drive

• Directly Replace Xbox One S Internal Hard Drive

• Xbox One S hard drive upgrade by external hard drive

• Wrapping things up

Xbox One S Overview and Size Limits 

Xbox One S is the redesigned model of the home video game console, released in August 2016. It supports 4K video playback and HDR10, and has a smaller size than ever, internal power supply and up to 2TB of internal storage, including 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. Xbox One S is the most advanced game console and attracts many game enthusiasts.

And usually, Xbox One comes with a 500GB drive as standard, but games become increasingly larger, one game even up to 110GB without 4k enhancements. Thus, it will be filled up quickly if you install various applications and games, and finally, you will receive the low hard disk space warning.

As for general users, they will do as suggested, remove unused applications and videos to free up space, but it’s not the ideal way. And you may need to do this again and again. To prevent this bad experience, the best way is to upgrade  Xbox One S drive to a larger one, preferably SSD disk. 

Two Ways to Upgrade Xbox One S Internal Hard Drive

Speaking of this, the first thought you can consider is using cloning methods to perform Xbox One S internal hard drive or  SSD upgrade. In fact, it's the best way to fix not enough space on the disk.

At the same time, Xbox One S is compatible with external hard drive and allows you to add external hard drive at least 256GB via USB 3.0 ports.

By comparison, the first way is better except for ultimately voiding your warranty. While the second way always carries some process overhead and consumes a lot of  CPU. Besides, the external hard drive is more vulnerable due to sudden shock or fall.

In sum, select a way depending on your needs and follow the steps in each method. 

Directly Replace Xbox One S Internal Hard Drive  

To directly replace Xbox One S internal hard drive or SSD, you need to prepare the best Xbox One S hard drive replacement software - AOMEI Backupper Professional. And It provides you with two ways in the following:

Disk Clone: It will clone all the games on the Xbox One S drive and keep its original structure. 

Partition Clone:  It allows you to clone partitions from one hard drive to another, especially useful when cloning  Xbox One S drive a new HDD or SSD larger than 2TB. And you need to keep the User Content partition in the end, otherwise, the system will fail to boot. 

And either way, this software clones only used sectors, thus you can easily clone large drive to smaller drive or SSD without boot issues. And more, you can accelerate the writing and reading speed of the SSD drive, and its lifespan.

How to start the cloning process? First of all, download this software and install it on your new computer. For server users, try  AOMEI Backupper Server.

Then, prepare a larger HDD or SSD in order to upgrade Xbox One S drive without losing data. Connect it to your new computer and be sure it's recognized. You also need some extracting tools for removing and installing hard drive for Xbox One S.

Note: Please backup the important data on the destination disk first, because all the data on the destination disk will be wiped out after the cloning.

1.  Take the Xbox One S drive out (refers to the tutorial offered by iFixit) and connect it to your computer. Select Disk Clone at the right side of the Clone tab.

2. Choose Xbox One S drive to clone.

3. Select the larger HDD or SSD as target disk to store data from Xbox One S drive. 

4 (Optional). Click Edit Partitions to resize partitions and avoid unallocated space left. You can also convert disk types (MBR and GPT) with it. It requies an upgrade to the professional edition first.

• Copy without resizing partitions: It will not resize the partition size.
• Add unused space to all partitions: It will reallocate the unallocated space to each partition of the target disk, appropriate for the disk size.
• Manually adjust partition size: It allows you to extend unallocated space to any partition on the destination disk you want. 
• Convert the destination disk from MBR to GPT: It helps to convert the partition style of the destination disk if it is different from the source disk and ensure secure boot while cloning GPT to MBR or vice versa. 

5. Check the "SSD Alignment" option the boost SSD disk performance.  And then, press Start Clone to upgrade Xbox One S hard drive.

After cloning, switch out the Xbox one S drive and install the larger HDD or SSD onto Xbox One S console, then you will find that there is more free space to store data on Xbox One S. Above steps also applied to Xbox One S SSD upgrade, and replace hard drive for Xbox One X.

Beside cloning, this software is still a backup and restore software for Windows 7/8/10/11/XP/Vista. With it, you could backup Xbox One S hard drive, then restore data to another hard disk. The entire process can be alternative to the cloning operations.

Xbox One S hard drive upgrade by external hard drive

1. Connect the prepared external hard drive to Xbox One S and make sure it can be recognized. Then, go to Settings > System > Storage.

Nex you will see the internal and external drive here.

2. Select the external drive, scroll down to the option “Format” and select “Format storage device”.

3. Completely shut down your computer and restart.

4. Move games and apps. Launch “My Games & Apps”, select the installed games from internal drive, press the “Menu” button on the controller, then click “Manage Game” > “ Move all” or “Move” to start the migration process.

Now, it will work smoothly as before. If you want a better performance or have more budget, you can choose to replace hard drive with SSD. The above method is also applied to Xbox One internal hard drive upgrade. You just need to follow the steps and try it yourself.

Wrapping things up

Xbox One S drive upgrade is the best way to fix low disk space warning, since you need more space instead of simply free up space. You can choose to perform Xbox One S internal hard drive or SSD upgrade or use an external drive to expand disk capacity. The previous one is recommended, since external hard drives do not operate as consistently as internal hard drives, and it is vulnerable and uses more CPU. 

For disk cloning software, you could consider using AOMEI Backupper Professional. It can help you do Xbox One S drive upgrade in all situations and improve SSD disk performance. And you can easily clone larger drive to smaller drive or SSD with its intelligent clone feature.  For IT technicians, you can consider AOMEI Backupper Tech or Tech Plus. You can use it on unlimited PCs or servers.