Xbox One X SSD Upgrade

Back in late 2017, Microsoft released their final and most powerful console in the Xbox One lineup. It was the Xbox One X, originally codenamed "Scorpio". Since then, the next generation of consoles has arrived, the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

The interesting thing is, that the Xbox One X, at some points, has better stats than the Series S, and in some ways has the ability to outperform the Series S. Both consoles has their strength and weaknesses, but in this article I will document my process of making my Xbox One X console even more capable, as a modern gaming solution, compared to the newest generation. It is actually straight forward, since it only involves upgrading the hard drive with an SSD.

The main reason to install an SSD is because of the faster load times. Mechanical hard drives are somewhat slow with today's standard, and newer consoles use SSD as a default this generation. Back in 2017, SSDs were more expensive as they are now. Today, you can buy an SSD for cheap, which makes this upgrade one of the most, if not the most, cost-efficient solutions to perform.

The whole installation process is somewhat straight forward. To perform the upgrade, you need a Torx8 and a Torx10 screwdriver. I have marked the screws that need to be removed on the pictures. For a step-by-step guide, I would recommend finding a "SSD upgrade guide", showing the entire process. There are some useful Xbox One X disassembly videos on YouTube.

Instead, I will share some thought I have about this upgrade, and some performance results.

Be aware that Xbox consoles are somewhat picky regarding the correct SSD size. As far as I know, the best option is to choose an SSD, that is labeled 500 GB, 1 TB or 2 TB. The console has trouble detecting drives that are labeled 480 GB, 960 GB, ... It is possible to get these drives to work, but it requires some manual work where you connect the SSD to a PC and prepares the drives with a script. If you have not acquired the SSD already, my advice would be to take the easy route, and choose an 500 GB, 1 TB or 2 TB. By doing so, you can just install the SSD directly into the console, and skip the whole scripting thing. Besides that, AFAIK this also enables the option to make a factory reset on the unit if needed, which is not possible with the other SSD sizes.

After installing the SSD and putting the unit back together, it is time to install the Xbox Operating System on the newly installed SSD. To do so, you have to download an Offline System Update (OSU1) and copy this to a Flash drive (minimum ~6 GB), that has been formatted to FTFS. All the details and the OSU1 file can be found on Microsoft's Xbox website.

After doing so, it is time to turn on the Xbox One X console. This will result in an error message, in my case an "E105" error. Plug in the flash drive, and the "Offline System Update" update will light up. Perform the update, and if all turn out well, the Xbox One X is now an improved console, with improved loading times.

After I did the upgrade, I noticed that the boot animation was missing. Instead, I just get a black screen until the Xbox finally makes it to the dashboard. I have done some googling, and this seems to be a common issue when performing an offline upgrade like this. There are options to remove the SSD from the console and connecting it to an PC and copy the boot animation file onto the SSD. There is also an option to wait for the next official Xbox update, which seems to fix this. If that is true, it should - in theory - be possible to download an outdated OSU1 file and use this to install the operating system on the console. This should boot up the console without the boot animation, but since there is an update ready when the Xbox comes online, it should fix the issue when updating the system. I have not tried this method, and I don't know if there are websites where you can download the required outdated OSU1 file. If you have tried this method and know if it works, please leave a comment!

As for the results, I did some testing regarding the initial OS boot up time and similar boot up times with 3 games. The overall conclusion is, that the loading times has increased between 9% - 36%, depending on the test. The biggest increase showed up when I tested the console start up time, from completely turned off, until the dashboard is finished loading.

When it comes to the loading times on games, it depended heavily on which title I was looking at. When testing Elden Ring, the improvement was ~30%, whereas Code Vein only improved the loading time by ~9%.

With that said, it is possible that other games will show even bigger, or minor, differences in the loading time.

Update 15/3 - 2023: After installing the March 2023 update, the boot screen animation is back! My conclusion is, therefor, that if the boot animation is missing after performing an SSD upgrade, just hang on until the next upcoming monthly update, and that will probably fix this.