Xbox Series X Launches With 802GB of Useable SSD Storage

Microsoft’s next-gen console, the Xbox Series X, and it’s more affordable counterpart, Xbox Series S, will launch this November. These devices and their specifications have been revealed providing us with a better understanding on what we can expect to find under the hood. Both consoles will see some major gains in both storage and speed with the addition of a custom NVMe solid-state drive (SSD). The Xbox Series X will ship with an internal drive of 1TB, with a slice of that storage going toward the operating system and system files.

According to reports, this leaves 802GB of usable space for games and other content. For comparison, this figure falls in line with the current-gen console, the Xbox One X, which saw a similar allocation for the 1TB hard drive it launched with back in 2017. 

The smaller console, Xbox Series S, will only ship with 512GB, which is likely to fill up quickly when cycling through games. Though Microsoft claims that Xbox Series S titles should occupy 30% less space than Series X games, it still comes at a time when titles frequently surpass the 100GB mark. This makes expandable storage a near necessity for storage flexibility.

Microsoft has teamed up with Seagate to produce Seagate Storage Expansion Cards for the Xbox Series X and S. The card is said to be 1TB of external SSD with 920GB usable. Both consoles have a dedicated, rear-facing port, reserved for the compact cartridge, with a PCIe 4.0 direct line connection to the CPU. USB storage will still work on the consoles but will only be able to run backward compatible titles.

At $220, the Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox isn’t cheap, though that is to be expected from such bleeding-edge specifications, matching the consoles internal speeds.