Worried about space in the Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X? Well, from today you can grab an Xbox Series expansion drive — but it’ll cost you almost the full price of the console.
Listings for Xbox Series expansion drives have begun appearing online on Australian retailers this morning. JB Hi-Fi are first cab off the rank, listing the Seagate Xbox Series Expansion 1TB card for a staggering $359:
The listing says “Xbox Series X,” but the description specifically notes that the card can be used with the Xbox Series S or X consoles. At $359, it’s almost half the price of the Xbox Series X ($749) and more than half the price of the Xbox Series S ($499) in Australia.
That said, even with download sizes supposedly shrinking a little for some games this gen, I can see plenty of games easily surpassing 100GB and even coming close to 200GB. Some games are already around 200GB on PC thanks to multiple DLC releases. It was eye-opening when games like Halo were hitting 100GB, or when 4K versions of games like Final Fantasy 15 were surpassing 150GB. Given that 4K assets is going to be the default for Xbox Series X (and PS5) owners going forward, and 4K gaming will be more achievable on PC with the next-generation GPUs, 150GB might be the new 100GB.
So next-gen NVMe expansion drives might be a pretty sensible investment this generation. Buy a console one year, get the expansion drive a year later. Or just be ruthless about how many AAA games you play. Either way, expect to see a lot more offerings like this going forward.
There’s no other listings for the Seagate expansion drive in Australia yet, but I’d expect EB Games and others to follow pretty shortly with similar prices. It also raises the question of when Sony will release that list of compatible expansion drives for the PS5, something Mark Cerny said they’d need to do to stop fans from buying off-the-shelf NVMe drives that didn’t have sufficient read/write performance for the PS5’s custom I/O controller. When that info’s available, we’ll let you know.
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