Xbox Series X owner shares tip to ensure you're not wasting storage space

An Xbox Series X owner has shared a tip to help players ensure that they aren't wasting huge amounts of hard drive space.

In a post on the console's subreddit, user tamdelay said that "if you have a USB external [drive] there is a small to medium risk that you may have accidentally installed the same game to both drives twice." That's a total of four games, filling up way more space on your console's SSD and your external storage than you need.

Tamdelay says there are two ways in which the duplication can happen. If an Xbox One game on USB gets an upgrade to the Xbox Series X version, it can be cloned onto the internal SSD. Alternatively, if a download fails and is restarted on a different drive, it can show up on both storage solutions.

Deleting a copy of the game is relatively simple, but it can be hard to tell which games are duplicated without going through your entire library and navigating to the 'Manage' screen on every entry. Fortunately, tamdelay points out a quicker route, sending players through console settings, then devices, and into the media remote menu. From there, there's an option to choose a custom app for the remote guides button. Open that and scroll through the resulting list of all the games on your system, where duplicate games will have a number in brackets next to their title; for example, the 'correct' version of Halo 5 would appear unchanged, but a duplicate version would be named "Halo 5 (1)."

You won't be able to delete the games from this menu, but if you make a note of the duplicate games, your journey through the 'Manage' screen should take a lot less time. Tamdelay says that they saved almost 200GB of space across their internal and external storage, having accidentally filled space by migrating and upgrading large games like Gears 5.

The Xbox Series X ships with 1TB of storage, which is a decent amount of space that it's relatively easy to expand, but with some games regularly taking up 100GB or more, players can quickly run out of room, so tips like this can make a significant difference.

If you're trying to maximise your storage, here are some of the best Xbox Series X external hard drives you can buy right now.