Replacing spinning metal in an Xbox One

I have a very old Xbox One with aging metal hurtling around to fetch games, which gives me and my partner a chance to grab coffee, maybe take the dog out, and have 30 seconds to spare before the next loading screen. Our Xbox came with a Kinect and Sunset Overdrive – Day One Edition – a fantastic game. I really mean it when I say it's old.

Recently though, we've gotten back to playing through some uncompleted games and they load slower than molasses. Final Fantasy XV? Yeah, go out and get a coffee, a gluten free bagel, and then come back, eat, and get ready to play!!

Waiting a long time between loads, whether due to Game Overs or not, is not fun.

So? What can we do? Replace the spinning platter(s) of metal in the console and move on to snappy solid state storage!

That's what exactly what I did.

  1. Uncase the Xbox (while its fully disconnected, naturally)
  2. Remove the spinning metal disk
  3. Plug in the spinning metal disk into a machine along with the new image
  4. Use dd to copy the image from the original disk to the, ideally, equally sized or larger, solid state disk that'll go back in its place. I've seen it written that there's limitations on the actual disk size supported, I went with a 2.5” 1TB Samsung 860 EVO to replace the 2.5” 5200 RPM Seagate laptop hard drive that was in there and had no issue.
  5. After dd-ing, attach the disk to a Window's “box” (I used a handy VM that I passed the block device into).
  6. With the Windows host, use diskmgr to resize the largest existing NTFS partition to occupy any newly available space (on your new disk, if its bigger than the original).
  7. Remove from the Windows machine (unmount, detach, etc.) and extract the disk to be inserted into the Xbox
  8. Insert the disk and reassemble the Xbox case with the disk secured where the old spinning hard drive was.
  9. Power back on and skip the trip to the coffee shop, because you're playing on a console with solid state storage! I think we saw a minute and a half (90+ seconds) drop to about 30 seconds to load Final Fantasy XV, I didn't take down good notes of the time, sorry.

I had hoped this post to be more “full”, but life got in the way and had to move with short notice winter 2020 (just before the holidays here in the US). If there's details folks would like to see added, please reach out to me – I'd be happy to add more in that case: editor AT prag.dev