It has come to light that Xbox One’s hard drive is substantially filled up by data, including the three operating systems. After all is said is done, it leaves only 391 out of 500 GB available, just enough room for 20 games.
This was confirmed via independent investigations by iFixit and IGN.
As you may have guessed, iFixit did a teardown of the Xbox One piece by piece. As part of that teardown, they took the 2.5 “ SATA hard drive, connected it to a PC, and checked the partitions. Aside from finding 391 GB of free data, they found that the partition was separated into five parts, labeled Temp Content, User Content, System Support, System Update, and System Update 2. Bear in mind that this accounts for one sample. If you remember how hard drives generally work, you can expect different units to have some variance in terms of available drive space. If you’re still having a hard time visualizing this, think of your iPhones.
IGN’s testing involved installing 25 apps, which filled out 1.6 GB, and 20 games, which was able to fill out as much as 362 GB. Interestingly, save data and video storage space is allocated below 100 MB.
So, for now Xbox One games take up as much as 18 GB, but as the system’s capabilities are discovered and pushed to the limit, future games can come up to as much as 60 to 70 GB. For the record, Microsoft has promised they will add external hard drive support, but have yet to give a timeframe.
Clearly, this will be a constraint to owners of the console very, very soon. It makes you wonder why Microsoft did not take the trouble to include external drive support from the onset. Hopefully, they can address the situation sooner rather than later.
