Xbox Series X Storage: Everything You Need To Know

The Xbox Series X boasts a 1TB NVMe SSD. NVMe stands for non-volatile memory express, and they’re the replacement for the Xbox One’s SATA drive, now a thing of the past. NVMe SSDs are an improvement because they communicate directly with a system’s CPU, making them considerably faster, which is largely how you see rapid loading screens. Astonishingly, they can send up to 25x more data than the old SATA.

1TB is the same amount of storage that the Xbox One X had, and the general overview is that it’s not enough for the full lifetime of a console. As a reference point, the latest Call of Duty offering, Black Ops Cold War, is a whopping 136GB on the Series X and Series S. To make matters a little less convenient, that 1TB of storage on the Xbox Series X is really only 802GB when you account for system files and the Xbox operating system, which takes up 198GB.

The Xbox Series S has a 512GB NVMe SSD, which is really only 364GB of usable storage, and while that seems insanely inferior to the Series X, you do have to consider the factor that games on the Series S take up 30% less space because they don’t require 4k textures. But either way, there’s a good chance that at some point down the line, deleting games to install updates for other games will become far too much of an inconvenience, and you’ll want to get yourself some more storage. How do you go about it?

Along with the launch of the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles came the release of Microsoft’s 1TB Storage Expansion Card, designed by Seagate. It’s a card that slots into the port at the back of the console, essentially functioning as a memory card. Jason Ronald is Xbox’s Director of Program Management, and in September of last year, before the launch, he did a Q&A on the consoles’ storage options. He notes that with the expansion card, the exact performance of the Series X and Series S's internal storage is matched. This is made possible through the Xbox Velocity Architecture API.

More good news about this is that the Seagate card will allow for backward compatible games to be played on it while also benefitting from the speed and performance level of the new generation console. For all of this convenience, you’ll have to shell out $220. If that’s a little pricey for you, especially after already spending $499 for the Series X or $299 for the Series S, not to worry, because other third party manufactured storage solutions are available and are certainly more forgiving on our pockets. If you want a list of options with prices, pros and cons for each detail, then scroll to the bottom of this article for some advice.

As mentioned above, there are a variety of options to solve storage issues, one of which is indeed a USB external hard drive. However, there are some key things to note about this. For one, an SSD drive is still faster than an HDD drive, so we recommend going with the former over the latter. But if speed and general performance is something you’re especially concerned with, the following is key.

While backward compatible games from the Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Xbox will all be perfectly fine to both store and play on any kind of external hard drive, games that are specifically optimized for the new consoles do need high-speed storage. This means that they can be stored on any kind of USB external hard drive, but to actually be played on the Series X or Series S, they’ll need to be transferred to the NVMe SSD.

Even games that you can play from any external hard drive will not give you the next-gen graphical enhancements. For many, that will mean that the official Seagate Storage Expansion Card is the only option for now, but of course, this is an irrelevant factor for some. Maybe keeping games on a USB hard drive for storage and transferring them to the SSD to play is worth avoiding the $220 price tag of Seagate’s card. If so, at the bottom of this article are some options for which external hard drives you could go with for the Xbox Series X or Series S. But before that, it’s worth knowing your way around the console.