Bad news for Xbox fans and people who managed to secure a pre-order of the Xbox Series X, as it turns out that the proprietary external storage for Microsoft's next-generation console will be seriously expensive.
Twitter leaker Wario64 revealed that a 1TB expansion SSD for the Xbox Series X will cost $219.99, and that you can pre-order one now from Best Buy. We always knew the proprietary storage expansion was going to be expensive, but this price is pretty steep.
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By default the Xbox Series X will come with 1TB of internal SSD space. That beats the PS5’s 825GB of super-fast storage. But given modern games can be tens of gigabytes large, it doesn't take too long or too many titles to fill up 1TB of storage space.
As such, for people who don’t want to mess around with downloading and reinstalling games on a regular basis, a storage upgrade will be needed. And that means it’s looking like they’ll need to cough up an extra $200 plus on top of the $499 Xbox Series X.
That puts the console’s likely total cost of ownership at north of $700. For that price you can get two $299 Xbox Series S consoles with change to spare, though that console is limited to 1440p gaming.
Given the external SSD uses PCIe NVMe tech, Xbox Series X storage was never going to be cheap. And internal NVMe SSDs for PCs aren't much cheaper. But it does show that next-generation console gaming can get expensive once your hard drive fills up.
The same is looking true for the PS5, which will be able to be upgraded with off-the-shelf M.2 NVMe SSDs, provided they have been certified by Sony. But given the PS5 is using a cutting-edge PCIe 4.0 SSD, these SSDs aren’t available yet. And we very much doubt they will be cheap.
As such, when the Xbox Series X launches on November 10 and the PS5 arrives on November 12 in the U.S. and November 19 in the U.K., people will need to be prepared to be savvy with how they use the storage space on their new consoles.
