[ad_1]
If you’re buying a new Microsoft Xbox Series X or Series S console, remember to save another $ 220 for external storage. That’s the price Seagate will charge for your storage expansion card, a likely necessary add-on for optimal performance.
Why? While the current Xbox One X can charge and play games using a conventional USB drive for storage, the next-gen Xbox Series S and X Series will only be able to play games designed for the Xbox One X from that external USB drive. Games designed and optimized for Xbox Series X can be stored on the external USB drive. If not play They will need to be loaded into the console’s internal SSD or a storage expansion card, which offers the same performance benefits as the internal SSD.
Seagate, however, will charge $ 219.99 for its 1TB storage expansion card and Microsoft has yet to identify a competing vendor that can help lower the price.
Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S consoles ship with a high-performance internal SSD: 1 terabyte on the X Series and 500 GB on the S Series. Both take advantage of the Xbox Velocity Architecture – Microsoft’s custom internal SSD technology offered 2.4 GB / s of raw I / O performance, more than 40 times the performance of Xbox One. The external Seagate expansion card offers the same capacity, Microsoft said in a blog post Thursday.
“You can play directly from the storage expansion card and you will have exactly the same experience and performance as if the game were running from the internal SSD,” Jason Ronald, director of program management at Microsoft.
But what Microsoft has somewhat overlooked is the fact that while consumers store their current Xbox One games on external drives, those drives can be used for emigrate existing games to Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, new consoles cannot play games optimized for Xbox Series X and S from those legacy units. That means a USB drive will be fine for running older, backward-compatible games that were written for the previous One X, but not for the X Series.
“While previous generation Xbox titles can still be played directly from your existing USB 3.1 external hard drives, to receive the full benefits of Xbox Speed Architecture and optimal performance, games optimized for Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X must be played from either a custom internal SSD or a Seagate storage expansion card, “Microsoft said.
And that means buying a new expensive expansion card.
Why is the Seagate card so expensive? “The Xbox Velocity architecture is a key innovation in our next-generation consoles, delivering unprecedented speed and performance that enable transformative gaming experiences never before possible on console,” said Ronald. “This level of consistent and sustained performance requires advanced components that cost more than the traditional hard drives or SSDs often found in PCs.”
In the past few days, anecdotal reports have begun to circulate that shoppers mistakenly bought the current Xbox One X instead of reserving the new one. Serie X. While that may or may not be true, Seagate’s $ 220 price tag for an expansion card is an unexpected surprise.
