Xbox Series X Price: 1TB Expandable Storage Almost As Expensive As Series S Console

Answering the question many prospective Xbox Series X buyers are asking, the first 1TB expandable storage drive for Microsoft’s next-gen console has been given a price.

Retailer Best Buy has begun taking pre-orders for the storage cards that will be selling at $219.99. These can be slotted at the rear of either the Xbox Series X or the more affordable Xbox Series S to match the internal SSD speed and provide 1TB of extra storage.

This confirms a Reddit leak two weeks ago from a digital storefront that mentions the $219.99 price.

With the Xbox Series X shipping with 1TB of SSD storage and the digital-only Xbox Series S possessing just 512GB of storage, expandable memory was always going to be a question regarding these two Microsoft next-gen consoles.

Previously announced for a Nov. 10 release date, the Xbox Series X has an announced price of $499 while the Xbox Series S is at $299. With this new information on the expandable storage drive though, the Xbox Series S jumps to nearly $520 to lift its capacity to 1.5TB.

On the other hand, the Xbox Series X would reach $720 when the drive is added for 2TB of storage.

This means that prospective buyers might then want to consider the Xbox Series X more as an option given its capacity directly out of the box especially since games (particularly AAA titles) will start to inhabit space on the next-gen consoles.

The expandable storage solution offered for the Microsoft consoles is proprietary and to date, only Seagate has been announced as an approved partner. The possibility of more suppliers and additional sizes, perhaps 2TB or even 4TB storage drives, could happen, but the prices will increase for those as well.

A simple alternative for these drives is using any USB drive to store the games when you’re not playing with them. The Verge notes that if those USB drives are not enhanced for the Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S, they can be run directly from the USB drive.

Since there is a dearth of comparable PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs in the market, judging the price of the expandable storage cards is not as simple as merely stating that they are too expensive or not. Also, since Sony will allow the PS5 to be slotted by their own players, the speed requirements of the internal SSD have to be met by these drives.