One of the cool things that the Xbox Series X and Series S will have is the ability to add in a storage expansion card- basically an easy swappable memory card like the good old days.
But that 1TB proprietary storage by Seagate made to replicate the custom SSD inside the Xbox is, as expected, pretty expensive.
The retail price for the Seagate 1TB storage expansion card is $219.99 USD (roughly RM917). Just 80 bucks short of an Xbox Series S. And a 1TB of hard disk these days is less than RM200- four times cheaper than the storage expansion card.
On Xbox Wire, Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management explains why these cards are expensive:
The Xbox Velocity Architecture is a key innovation of our next generation consoles, delivering unprecedented speed and performance enabling transformative gaming experiences never before possible on console.
This level of consistent, sustained performance requires advanced components which comes at a higher cost than traditional hard drives or SSDs often found in PCs.
By partnering with an industry leader in Seagate, we worked together to deliver an expandable storage solution which delivers identical performance at the lowest cost possible and available this holiday.
Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management
The Xbox Velocity Architecture is a custom tech that differs from regular hardware input/output seen in conventional hard disks and SSDs, and what sets this generation of consoles apart from the previous one. The PS5 also has its own custom solution for its custom internal SSDs, being much faster than what’s on offer in the market right now.
The good news is that you can still plug in a normal USB 3.1 hard disk to an Xbox Series. You can play past Xbox games (OG Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One) straight from the hard disk.
But also, you can still store Xbox Series games on a hard disk. While you still need the games to be on the internal SSD or a storage expansion card to play them, you can still store them on a hard disk, so that you won’t need to redownload it all over again when you want to make room for other games to play.
Unless you really want to have 2TB (or 1.5TB for Xbox Series S) of games ready to play, a hard disk is still useful when using an Xbox Series console.
The Xbox Series X and Series S launches on November 10.
via Xbox Wire