Microsoft is adding a neat little update to Xbox Series X|S owners who have invested in the ecosystem in a big way.
They revealed this new feature in the latest Xbox Update Preview Release Notes:
“Expand Your Xbox Storage with Support for Larger Drives
We are enabling support for external USB drives larger than 16TB, so you can be sure your favorite games are always ready to play! Newly formatted drives that are larger than 16TB will be formatted with multiple partitions to utilize all available space for games and apps. These will appear as multiple devices in the storage devices list.
Note Drives greater than 16TB that have already been formatted will be unaffected by this change and would need to be reformatted to take advantage of the updated support for larger drives.”
Microsoft launched the Xbox Series X|S with an official Storage Expansion Card from Seagate. Subsequently, they added Western Digital as a partner with their own Storage Expansion Cards, as well as official external Game Drive hard drives.
As explained in this FAQ, the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S will work with any storage device, as long as it uses the USB3.1 protocol and has a minimum of 128 GB in storage. The difference in using these official cards is that they are optimized to get the best performance for games on the console.
So there’s reason to buy official storage if you can afford it. However, since these official storage devices didn’t turn out to be that popular, it isn’t likely that Seagate and Western Digital will make them in bigger storage densities.
For Xbox gamers who have big game libraries, and that includes gamers who want to have everything in their Game Pass subscription playable from a hard drive, this upgrade was a long needed godsend. Games have been getting bigger in this generation, and at such a rapid pace, that Sony and Microsoft gave up on making and adopting new physical disc formats to catch up.
Just last year, Western Digital launched a new 32TB drive, called the Ultrastar Data Center HC690. Before you ask, you are definitely not going to be able to use these on either your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S. These and last year’s HC680 are deliberately being sold only to corporate buyers, and aren’t designed to work with consoles or general purpose computers. So we don’t know if the new ePMR or UltraSMR technologies in these drives will create incompatibilities with consumer devices.
They might also be 2 or three times more expensive than a PlayStation 5 Pro, so you really would be better off buying two 16 TB drives instead. But this points to how the tech industry is now pushing towards drives instead of optical discs for the future of storage. And that makes upgrades like these necessary for game consoles as well.
We may very well be seeing a future where game consoles will work with NAS systems, because games on the tenth generation of consoles will rise in GB sizes that you’ll need multiple drives to store them. But maybe we’re looking too far ahead there. For now, Xbox Series X|S owners can look forward to more options on how to manage their game libraries.
