Microsoft has announced the price of the expandable storage version of Xbox X.
The Xbox Series X will come with 1TB of SSD storage and the Xbox Series S just 512GB of storage. The actual price of Series S is $299 so if you take that extra 1TB, you will have to pay $520 for 1.5TB of storage.
For now, only Seagate has been announced as a manufacturer so far. Microsoft has said that it will add more suppliers and variants in the near future. Well, this is not a feature for which you can’t have an alternative. If you don’t want to shell out an extra $220, you have the option of using any USB drive to store games when you don’t need to play them. If they’re not enhanced for Xbox Series X / S then you’ll even be able to run them direct from USB storage.
Well, Sony has some kind of advantage here. Sony doesn’t restrict you on which drives you can use for storage. All you have to do is fit in a drive that will meet the speed requirements of the internal SSD. Those speed requirements mean that PS5 owners will need the very best PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives that are starting to make their way into PCs.
For now, the pricing may be high but with time it will reduce for sure. As the manufacturing will increase and prices will go down. So Sony will have an advantage over Microsoft. If Microsoft doesn’t get more manufacturers who will provide these drives at a cheaper cost. Maybe in the future, Microsoft will allow you to add drives of your own choice like Sony is doing now if they are not able to add more manufacturers to their list.
Let’s see how this extra storage thing goes out in the future and will it be an important factor in the sales of these consoles or not.