Xbox Series X will have a 1TB built-in custom SSD for game installs, which is more than the 825GB available on PS5’s own custom SSD.
However, as we learned now, a significant chunk of that size will not be usable for game installs: in reality, you only have 802GB.
IGN has an early hands-on with Microsoft’s next-gen console, and has reported that missing space from that 1TB allocation goes to OS and system files.
The good news is, file transfer speeds from the internal SSD to external drives (either a normal hard disk or an SSD) is fast. You can’t play Xbox Series games from these external drives (but you can if you buy the expensive expansion drive). But at least it’s good to know that swapping games out of your current rotation to an external disk rather than deleting and redownloading them again is a viable option.
Sony has yet to divulge any hands-on details of the PS5, and it’s going to be interesting if their touted 825GB custom SSD has already deducted OS and system file use (which is great) or not (which means we have less space to work with and that’s not great).
No reports on how the Xbox Series S is like so far, but that’s likely to suffer with even more limited storage space- it only has 512GB of SSD storage, which leaves around 314GB of storage for games.