Bad news for Xbox fans and those who have already pre-ordered the Xbox Series X, but it turns out that Microsoft's proprietary external storage for its next-generation game console will be very expensive.
Twitter leaker Wario64 revealed that the 1TB expansion SSD for the Xbox Series X will cost $219.99 and can be pre-ordered at Best Buy. We knew proprietary storage expansion would be expensive, but this price is quite high.
By default, the Xbox Series X comes with 1TB of internal SSD space. This surpasses the PS5's 825 GB of ultra-fast storage. However, given that modern games can be tens of gigabytes in size, it doesn't take much time or number of titles to fill up 1TB of storage space.
So for those who can't be bothered to download and reinstall games on a regular basis, a storage upgrade will be necessary. That means they will need to add another $200 to the $499 Xbox Series X
. At this price, one could get change for two $299 Xbox Series S's, but the console is limited to 1440p games.
Given that external SSDs use PCIe NVMe technology, storage for the Xbox Series X will not be cheap. Internal NVMe SSDs for PCs are also not that cheap. However, a full hard drive indicates that next-generation console games could be expensive.
The same would likely apply to the PS5, which could be upgraded with an off-the-shelf M.2 NVMe SSD, provided it is Sony certified. However, given that the PS5 uses state-of-the-art PCIe 4.0 SSDs, these SSDs are not yet available. It is also highly unlikely that these SSDs will be available at a reasonable price.
So when the Xbox Series X launches on November 10 and the PS5 on November 12 in the US and November 19 in the UK, we will need to be prepared to become familiar with the storage space usage of the new consoles.
Comments