Proprietary storage is bad, but with a 1TB or 2TB card, you can save at least a little bit more than usual.
Utilizing a proprietary expansion card is the only option to completely increase the amount of storage space available on an Xbox Series X/S, regardless of whether this is a good or bad thing. Despite the fact that the consoles have been around for three and a half years, there are only two official options available: the Storage Expansion Card from Seagate and the WD Black C50 Drive. It is a constrained circumstance; but, if you are sick of removing and reinstalling games in order to make room for them, variants of each card are currently available at a price that is at least a little bit lower than it would normally be. The 1TB WD Black C50 is currently available at Amazon for the price of $125, while the 2TB Seagate Storage Expansion Card is currently available at Best Buy and Amazon for the price of $230.
Despite the fact that the former is $5 higher than the lowest price we have ever observed, it is still $25 less than the card’s most common street pricing. It is important to note that Seagate’s 1TB model has theoretically been sold for as little as $90 on a few occasions in the past; however, these deals have sold out in a very short amount of time; as of the time this article was written, the price of that drive was $140. Meanwhile, the reduction on the Seagate card with 2 terabytes of storage is identical to the best price that we have monitored. When it is in stock, the item costs $250. The fact that WD does not provide a 2TB card makes this the option with the biggest capacity that you may purchase. Both of these reductions are equivalent to the pricing that we observed during Black Friday the previous year.
I want to emphasize that these costs are not particularly attractive when compared to the overall storage market. In order to upgrade the PlayStation 5, Sony allows you to use a far wider variety of typical M.2 solid-state drives (SSDs), almost all of which are available at prices that are substantially lower per gigabyte. To give just one example, the best option in our guide to purchasing a PS5 solid-state drive (SSD) presently costs $90 for 1TB and $158 for 2TB. Despite the fact that the prices of solid-state drives (SSDs) for consumers have usually grown over the past few months, this is the case.
If, on the other hand, you have a relatively new Xbox, you won’t have many options. It is possible to utilize a conventional external drive to store Series X/S games or to run backwards-compatible titles from the Xbox One and prior consoles. However, the only method to play games from the current generation is to use either the internal storage or one of these official cards. In spite of this, the cards themselves are almost as quick as the SSD that is built into the computer, and the process of installing them is very simple: It is sufficient to simply insert the diminutive device into the expansion port of the Xbox, and you will be ready to go. Despite the fact that the price shock is the most significant drawback, these discounts ought to make things a little bit easier.