The launch day for the Xbox Series X/S is almost upon the world. If you’re in that group of early adopters, you might have some questions. Or if you haven’t been on the Xbox train for a while, you might have forgotten some things. We’ve assembled some basic guides for how to handle various features while setting up your console.
Since this is a new high-performance console, there are going to be some users who want to unlock every ounce of performance this console has. And just like previous consoles and modern PCs, caching is a thing. The console makes use of caching to save data and assets for games to speed up loading times in your most-used apps and games. You can potentially clear up some space on the SSD by clearing this cache. The trade-off is that if you want to experience the full performance of a game, the SSD will have to spend time reloading the cache. The answer of whether to do this lies with the user, as you have to understand if space is at a premium for you. The new consoles only have about 800GB of storage by default on the Series X, so it might be.
Since the Series S is an all-digital console, this might help as well with the speed of loading games. There are two ways to clear the cache on an Xbox Series X or S—and doing both can increase the speed of your console.
Here are the steps to clear the cache on the new Xbox Series X:
- Press the Xbox Button at the center of the face of the controller to bring up the Home sub-menu
- Go to your Profile
- Click the “Settings” Option
- Click the “Devices and Connections” Option
- Click “Blu-Ray” in the New Menu
- Click “Persistent Storage”
- Then “Clear Persistent Storage”
If you don’t want to go through this step, there is a way to power cycle the console. Remove the power cord from the back of the console and leave it unplugged for several minutes. Restart the console and the memory cache of the console should be cleared. If you’re having trouble booting the console for some reason, this might also help clear any problems that were residing in memory.
If you were experiencing slow boot times, crashes, or networking issues, going to clear the cache might help. You could have misconfigured or corrupted data in the cache on the Series X that could be causing thee problems.
