We’re still looking forward to the day when we can pre-order the Xbox Series X, but in the meantime, Seagate has revealed the first third-party external storage option for the next-gen console. The X Series plans to exclusively use a new type of storage expansion card to ensure fast speeds for X Series games, unlike the external hard drives we use to store our latest generation games. Given that only one company has revealed a storage option for the X Series, it’s unclear whether we’ll see more or whether Microsoft has partnered with Seagate to be the sole manufacturer of the console’s storage cards. Unfortunately, no pricing was revealed, but you can sign up on the Seagate website to stay updated.
The Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X is a custom NVMe PCIe Gen4x2 SSD, which means it’s pretty fast – NVMe SSDs are the fastest storage option you can get for PCs today. The next generation of games has emphasized these speeds in both fast load times and stutter-free open-world broadcasts. Unfortunately, we don’t have the exact clock speeds of these storage cards.
Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X
The only downside to these storage cards is their capacity. 1TB is expected, but looking at this past generation, the games have gotten huge – many games are between 50-100GB, but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is currently powering 200GB. It’s reasonable to think that next-gen games will be even bigger, although Microsoft says it plans to use dedicated hardware to use decompression and installation to keep game sizes low. There’s also a single storage slot on the back of the X Series, which worries me a bit about how often you’ll manage your storage space.
Seagate also mentions the “improved overall performance” of “thousands of Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One titles” through the use of the new storage expansion card. This is likely to refer to games that are already pre-programmed to take advantage of more powerful hardware; it will most likely affect charging times and performance in the open world, although we cannot confirm anything at this time.
Of course, the Xbox Series X will still be compatible with external hard drives, although you will only be able to use them for games not optimized for X Series and titles compatible with previous versions. That means you will be able to move your entire Xbox One library to X Series quite easily – just transfer all your games to an external hard drive and then connect it to X Series. If any of those games have received an Xbox Series X update However, they will not be stored on the hard disk. Plan your game installations accordingly.
