Regarding Xbox One external storage and hard drive failure

[Iggy Wolf]

So recently Forza Horizon 4 was updated and my Xbox One tried to update it and constantly had the installation stop. At first, I thought it was the network connection being bad as usual (or how my Xbox One likes to stop and restart intallations sometimes). Today, when I turned it on, it didn't even show my external hard drive, with it requiring installing all the games that I had on the external.

After reconnecting the drive and hard rebooting the Xbox One, it showed the external storage space again and finally started to properly download the patch for FH4. Nonetheless, does this mean my external was simply poorly connected or is it possibly failing? It's currently blinking a blue light because the patch is being written onto the HDD but can the external hard drive's stability (and if it's failing) affect the speed at which it writes the data? And should I reformat it and/or replace it?

[[☥] - CJ -]

a faulty drive can affect speed yes, but as you noted it could have simply been a loose connection.

formatting it wont do anything if the drive is at fault

see how it goes then decide if u want to replace it or not

[Iggy Wolf]

Yeah, because when I last time told the Xbox One to update FH4 (for some reason, it's downloading the entire's game's storage space just to patch the game), and turned it off (it's in Instant On mode though so it's still supposed to download even while in stand-by), when I turned it on again, it didn't even show the external, and of course made no progress on the FH4 download.

I restarted it now and it seems to be downloading consistently (the blue light keeps blinking while it initially stopped in the middle of the download). I'm just worried that if I turn it off, whether the external will turn off as well (I unchecked the option "turn off storage" in the power mode settings if it matters). Also, the drive is only 3 months old, as I got it back in August.

Originally posted by ☥ - CJ -:

a faulty drive can affect speed yes, but as you noted it could have simply been a loose connection.

formatting it wont do anything if the drive is at fault

see how it goes then decide if u want to replace it or not

And it disconnected again. Unbelieveable. Completely, while downloading, the Xbox One no longer detected the HDD. The blue blinking light stopped blinking.

[[☥] - CJ -]

Then it could be the drive, could be a bad cable, connector, or slot

can either try a different connection cable if you have one available, or get a new drive.

I suppose you could also connect it to your PC and do a check disk or health check, if you can that is.

[Iggy Wolf]

Nah, I just narrowed it down. Turns out, the drive itself is fine. After copying a game from internal to external and downloading the Blu-Ray app to external, the drive clearly works. It loads up my games and never kicks me out. For some reason, it specifically only gets overloaded trying to download all 56 GB of Forza Horizon 4 (no big deal, since I have it on PC).

It has no issue downloading anything else over the network or from the internal partition. I guess FH4's servers overload the download and also end up overloading the external drive, turning it off in the process. I think if the drive itself had any read/write problems, then it wouldn't even load my games or be able to download an app or move/copy a game over.