How Does Storage Work On The Xbox Series S & X?

Technical question team Xbox.
I pre order and pre down load assassins creed on my Xbox one x external hard drive.
I get my series x day one and plug in the external hard drive, copy game to internal series x drive.
As I now have what was an Xbox one game will it require a quick patch for series x enhancements etc.
Or will I have to re-download the full new series x version???
I don’t think this has been truly answered.

@Dezzy70 If I were to guess I'd say it would have to download the Series X version. I would have thought they would be structured differently because of the SSD

@carlos82
Maybe but as they are cross generation games and the first batch I thought maybe they won’t take full advantage of the SSD in the series x just the standard speed upgrade.

@TheNewButler Yes they will be pretty much swappable and plug-n-play. It will be detected by the system OS.

@Dezzy70 You will still need to download the 4K assets for Series X. Smart Delivery just cuts down the download size.

@Z3u5000
That’s what I was thinking.
I guess once transferred to the series x internal drive it would know the game is now on the Series x and ask to download the patch, I think?

Great that we can still use our current external HDD as a simply back-up for our next-gen games to help cut down on redownloading from the internet if we just want to store a game for a bit.

I still may get the external SSD card eventually, though. I like for all my games to be playable at all times.

@TheNewButler Cost not yet announced officially but rumour of being $220/£170 for the 1tb...
It's only a rumour however..
No news about larger size drives but I would think in time a 2tb would be revealed..

Since I am most likely doing the Xbox access payment plan thing, I might just pick one of these up at launch to get ahead of the curve.
Then again... I might wait because 2 TB total still isn’t much at all, especially next gen. I was hoping they’d have a higher capacity out the gate... but then again the console would be even more $$$.

@BANJO i know the consoles are subsidized, but half the price of the whole X console and almost the whole price of S for just double the storage is utterly outrageous.

I do wish both companies found an alternative to still-young, nvme ssds. Heavy gamers are going to be paying $1500 in storage for their $300 consoles...

I'm sure a lot off none branded cards will appear on the market over time. speed rating is not that high and the are just nvme drives with a modified interface

@NEStalgia That was my first response, but the way round it as the article suggests is to just connect your current HDD drive to use as storage for the Xbox Series S/X games and transfer them back and fourth to the SSD when you wish to play them..
Not ideal but you can keep costs down that way while just concentrating on a few titles at once...

I uninstall games as soon as I'm done with them for the foreseeable future. I'm not buying any extra hard drive.

Also unless I'm wrong. MS won't have any true next gen games for 1-2 years after Series X launch? So I guess can wait on that extra SSD thing anyway?

@BANJO Yeah, that's what I intend to do (plus i have a small stockpile of official x1 drives already ). But still.... The second hdd costing half a console is horrifying. Brings back 360 memories

Still wonder how Sony's hanndling that. They won't say if you can store things on a spinner still, and their sdd spec is absurd. That's the big frustrator this gen, and especially for digital editions.

@themightyant Kind of true, (and assuming Sony also will allow bulk storage drives) but of theres one thing i learned with x1x i loved most of all, it was browsing my whole library and just jumping into any game on a whim. I'll miss that dreadfully.

Maybe they'll put an xcloud app on the box so you can play your library on the fly like that (while smart delivering locally).

I'd love to see is a "smart copy" software setting, where if you go to launch a game that's on the bulk drive it can automatically copy it to the ssd, smart delivery style into reserved space or something. Or integrate it like the previous paragraph with xcloud and smart delivery. Something in software and services to make it seamless.

That's the kind of thing i could see ms adding in a few years, while ps5 sticks with whatever was at launch. X1 ui was horrid until 2018 when it became awesome.

This is the price we all pay for these new, fancy, expensive SSD drives. And PS5 gamers will have the same problem. That thing is launching at (probably) $500 and even has less room than the XSX.

The jump from 360/PS3 era wasn’t that huge, to be honest. That’s not the case this time around. And when you make these big leaps, it’s going to be expensive.....no matter what console you own.

@KelticDevil But 825 GB is enough storage for gamers according to Mark Cerny's PS5 presentation, thus PS5 doesn't need any expansion solution 🤪.

I will use my 4TB HDD as storage for Series X. I'll wait for Microsoft and Seagate to release 2TB expansion cards and I'll get that in a couple of years if I can afford it. I think that no one should worry about expansion cards yet.

Also, as @NEStalgia said, the UI of Xbox One has become the best of the generation for managing games, even ones that you don't own, so I expect an easy way to move games from external HDD to internal SSD for playing them.

@TheNewButler We tried to answer your questions on this thread somehow. As for the Elite, a Series 3 model is likely.

@BlueOcean

I completely agree with everything you just said. Lol.

@Tasuki

Sadly.....it looks like it. Lol.

This was an incredibly useful read. Nice to hear that you can download next-gen games to a USB hard drive and then transfer when you're ready. Also means my current 2TB drive is fine for X1/360/OG games too!

I'll probably get the 1TB expansion at some point though.

@Tasuki switch uses cartridges, PlayStation and xbox use memory cards, Mario 64 comes out in a week and crysis is launching. Who knew miyamoto was would eventually win, and expensive solid state storage with small sizes and fast loads really were the industry choice over optical discs. 1996 has finally been decided. All we need is Sega to announce hardware and everything is rad!

88 miles per hour, baby!

@BlueOcean Sony outright refuses to show the back inputs of the console, so we really know nothing of their storage addons. I assume the reason for not showing the back is one of possibly several. First maybe the psvr breakout box is built in (simplifying setup, suggesting psvr2 costs are lower. Suggesting ps5 costs are higher so everyone subsidizes vr... . )They wouldn't want to show that yet. Another might be usb c 3.1 ports, or thunderbolt 3 ports for using 3rd party ssds. Or proprietary connectors for storage like xsexs that haven't revealed yet. (Ahh vita memories....)

For whatever reason, the ports are as secret as the price and may involve add on storage. Or not.

Less than 500gb of available space on a all digital console it’s a joke... You can’t play COD and RDR 2 because you have only space for one.... Even than 1 TB available is very low....

@NEStalgia I agree, the cost of the SSD is great, especially in relation to the console cost, no getting around that. As you said you like to see all games at once and be able to play them easily. That's one of the things I will also greatly miss..
However, SSD prices should lower in time, prices should come down, everyone will just have to manage manage the storage effectively...
The worrying aspect is for those that don't know you can use HDD as a storage medium for the games next gen.....

@TheNewButler That's what I said "somehow". We tried... somehow.

@NEStalgia Sony is being shady about PS5. Literally, every little thing we know about it has been revealed after Microsoft and in a more ambiguous form. I laughed when Mark Cerny said that 825 GB is the magic number and enough for gamers. Anyway, they must have options for storage expansion but since they haven't shown the PS5 ports, we have no idea about what options do PS5 owners get.

If PS5 has the VR circuitry that would make the console more expensive, indeed.

@themightyant It's a catch 22. Of course I understand the goodness of speeds and fast loads, but it comes at the cost of the beauty of a digital console "A full arcade at your fingertips at any time." I have 300+ games on my 1X and I can start any of them at a whim and toggle between them at a moment. Going from that, back in time, to basically "get up and switch cartridges" like it's an SNES but with an hour + wait to install seems like terrible time travel after 1X got me hooked. Especially as games want to push GaaS and keep you engaged, this new model seems best suited for the play style of Sony games where you play the 20 hour story once then move onto another game, than MS games like Flight Sim and Forza where you want to keep coming back to it sporadically even just for half an hour. I can't imagine socking the ISP with another 20+GB download every time I want to drop into Forza for an hour! ( Yes, I know any of my One games can still work just as they always have, except ones that get SeX patches, of course FH4 will get a SeX patch, so that won't be running from the spinner drive. )

I wish the consoles had gone with SATA SSDs rather than trying to push the envelope with TotL nvme. It would have yielded 75%+ of what they're trying to achieve with a fraction of the cost. I think that would have really been the sweet spot to give us basically all the benefit and many, many, many times the speed improvement of SSDs without emulating the PC gamers with liquid cooled neon lit monster rigs by spending top dollar on prototype tech that depreciates rapidly. And that goes double for PS5 where they spent fortunes on that ridiculous SSD that's just a bit faster.

@BANJO To me, it's one of thos things of pushing limits for the sake of it where it actually causes detriment to play. And both companies are doing it, so there's no finger pointing in that. They were SO obsessed with a few ms loading time differences they went with bleeding edge tech instead of mature tech. It's the exact same thinking that lead to the N64's tiny, expensive cartridges.

It's like focusing on resolution at the cost of frame rate. Sure, hitting that 4k is great, but if the game's dropping to 20fps it's playing WORSE because of it. That's how I feel about the new nvme SSDs they're using rather than far more sanely priced SATA (which was already expensive enough.) Sure they jumped all the way to "finish" to get maximal speed boost on I/O, but they did so at the cost of the "every game at your fingertips" concept they really sold so well last gen. They could have had both, but there was an obsession with top speed. It's a generational disappointment at this point, not an XSeX specific one.

@BlueOcean I'm not sure it's shadiness, but if there's one thing Sony is consistently good with and MS is consistently bad with, it's marketing. But Sony's marketing strategy revolves around having total control of perception. They quite literally can not market something with their proven strategy unless they know exactly what the rest of the market is doing and can target their messaging to spin perception to view it exactly how they want people to view it. I think that means they always need to go last for everything because they need to tell consumers how they're supposed to think of the thing they're being shown.

Thus, they needed to know everything XBox before they could craft the right spin for how you're supposed to view the information they deliver, when they deliver it.

I don't think that's new. It's their time honored strategy since the 90s. But the long cat and mouse game makes it look really bad when they won't even talk about the connection ports on the back of a console....

I would not doubt the VR is built in. The processing for the HMD adds cost, but in the long term it's probably cheaper to put it onboard. Currently it's managed with a USB2.0 connection and HDMI 1.4. The PSVR5 undoubtedly would require a USB-C 3.1 or TBolt connection and HDMI 2.1. That's a lot of extra licensing of expensive ports (and a more confusing consumer process.) that does nothing but slow down the interface anyway. Up front it would add to the hardware cost, but then that also means lowering the cost of the next HMD, an easier sell for it, and less licensing in producing it for all the connectors etc....I could see them doing the math and realizing that over x amount of projected VR sales, it would come out cheaper spending on it now and putting it in every console, and boost sales later. And boost sales of remaining VR inventory since the old VR will work with PS5. Part of the reason we can't guess price based on component cost on this stuff. They're factoring in projected sales and costs on hardware that probably wont exist for another year or two into the 6 year cost of the total platform.

@TheNewButler At least he finally confirmed "it works kind of like XSeX." They should really have a web page with a PS5 FAQ, where you have a list of questions about how different features work and what it supports, and when you click on them it just takes you to xbox.com.

It's still ridiculous how they expect the digital age to work with these silly tiny, obnoxiously expensive, bleeding edge drives. I really don't know what possessed them to go that route in consoles. They skipped past the obvious upgrade and sent everyone "to the future" before it was here.

@TheNewButler @themightyant My complaint isn't with the choice of SSDs vs spinners. The last time I bought a spinner for a productivity PC was probably 8+ years ago, no contest with SSD for performance and reliability. It's simply the choice of going with the most exotic SSD at any cost and storage constraint, on a gaming platform where storage is a more tremendous limitation than speed, where using normal SATA SSDs would have improved upon speed by many multiples, and the push to exotic drives only incrementally improves upon that. I just don't understand why they went "hey, we can put in a 3TB SSD for $150 a unit and improve speeds 30x versus the old machine, or a 1TB SSD for $300 a unit and improve speeds 35x........let's just go with the expensive one!" It's an awkward choice which is both a major factor in their costs on the consoles themselves (and how much money they're eating to sell at or near expected prices), a big cause of the weird 4 month pricing game, and will hit gamers in the wallet with add-on storage very hard, all for minimal gain over SATA SSD + USB3.1 - boom better ,faster storage, for less, and easily upgradable.

There's nothing wrong with that performance level for gaming at all. 100GB+ directories copy over in 5 minutes between drives, over USB 3.1, and I/O is negligable to a degree that it would have still wowed massively with nearly no loading times. There's a lot of extra cost for a minimally relevant improvement going with the nvme route, IMO. Like I said above, I think this storage crisis is probably the best use case for cloud gaming there is. If they could make your purchased library entirely available on xCloud, and build the xCloud client into the XSeXS, you could play any game from your library on the cloud instantly, and then choose to smart deliver it to your SSD if you're going to want to play it locally more. That could be a big win. That's really the only way to make it not obnoxious for anyone that isn't just playing through one or two games and moving onto the next one, serially....which is, I presume, a significant part of XBox owners, particularly compared to PS owners based on the habits of 1st party offerings. Doesn't help the same problem on PS5, of course, but it could make the XBox digital experience much more amazing than PS's (again.)

My guess is Sony had a weird obsession with it, and MS didn't want to be left behind. Plus MS didn't want to have to go with the "X1X mid gen upgrade" scenario so bad they tried to put the mid-gen specs in the initial launch and eat the cost.

@NEStalgia I agree, Sony waits until customers tell everyone else what they want and then tell those customers what they want to hear. The problem is that people are well-informed now and they won't necessarily buy it unless they can see it. Nobody except the biggest Sony fanboy would say that the PS5 presentation was informative and coherent when they didn't provide any specifics and it was full of ambiguous technology information with some misleading bits and ridiculous claims, surrounded by 3D audio trademarks and ear profiles gibberish, purposefully avoiding key facts like sustained TFLOPs and CPU/GPU sustained clocks.

As for storage, I think that Sony went a little so far with the SSD technology that it could backfire. Series SSD seems more reasonable and, combined with Velocity Architecture, Microsoft expects even higher speeds. Expansion storage is straightforward but expensive on Series X and uncertain and even more expensive on PS5 but in a few years prices will drop. PS4 was a brilliant console but PS5 seems too overdesigned and with more expensive gimmicks than needed.

@NEStalgia I see where you are coming from, like you I have a lot of games playable quickly, roughly 280+ games on my OneX, can start any of them at a whim and switch between them easily...
Giving this up for next gen will not be easy..
Personally, I will not be there at launch as my backlog is huge and by the time I get further through it and ready to get a Series X I just hope SSD prices are less...
There is no solution to having everything playable at a whim going forwards with Series X, and certainly not at the launch. In someways it is a step back, especially for convenience..
Everyone will just have to get accustomed to moving games across from HDD to SSD and back again...

@themightyant Yes but Sony's SSD is more expensive and Microsoft's Velocity Architecture boost the SSD performance 2.5x on average and that's a smart engineering solution.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/14/a-closer-look-at-xbox-velocity-architecture/

Both will be strikingly fast. Even Series S will be and that's almost unbelievable at that price (with less storage capacity, of course).

@themightyant I didn't say that you aren't aware. Sony haven't demonstrated how their console manages all the data so I wouldn't be so sure that it has the same level of engineering optimisation as Xbox, it's not like Sony's engineers have proven that they're as good as Microsoft's before.

@themightyant Xbox One X was an engineering miracle while PS4 Pro has overclocked CPU and GPU PS4 chips and the OS is not able to optimise PS4 games performance other than an inconsistent boost mode that was added later. PS5 has PS4 and Pro performance profiles for running PS4 and Pro games under-clocked. Compare all that with how Xbox One X manages backwards compatibility.

As for Xbox One VCR, that was a long time ago with a different boss, I bought a PS4 before an Xbox One because of that. Microsoft, at least, have demonstrated more than Sony this far, with real-time comparisons showing current-gen games running on Series X without altering the code. Sony has shown absolutely nothing in terms of speed improvements.

@BlueOcean Hard to fault Sony for their marketing strategy. Rather than trying to impress customers, wait for them to tell you what they want, see what everyone else is offering, and then tailor your offering and the messaging around it to at least make them feel like you're giving them exactly what they wanted that the competition didn't.

And it's certainly a better strategy than their tone-deaf PS3 announcement and the Vita memory sticks [insert "I didn't ask for this" meme]

IMO both presentations were bizarrely generic. We watched, looking for E3 type presentations, and from Sony we got an hour of games, most of them multiplats, and a lot of generic cagey gibberish about new tech, and from Microsoft we got a one hour Game Pass informercial for the year 2024, some more generic cagey gibberish about new tech, and a gameplay trailer for Halo that everybody instantly decided was the worst thing to happen to gaming since lootboxes.

Neither presentation did a thing to convince me I want either console. I want a PS5 for Ratchet & Clank because Insomniac is one of the best devs around, other exclusives, and to play my existing PSVR without the system limit imposed trash resolution just to keep framerates. I want an XSeX to play my existing games in 4k at a stable 60fps....plus the new things in the future.

Both companies went very overboard with the SSD. There was just no need for it, and while I don't expect either company to go full Wii, I would think the Yokoi method of "withered technology" really needs to be a more grounded staple in console design. They both could have built blazing consoles on par with all but the best gaming PCs that blew the old consoles out of the water, but they for some reason insisted on the most bleeding edge (in MS's case) and "so bleeding edge it doesn't actually even exist yet" in Sony's case...... for no real reason as far as I can tell. Sony really wet the bed on that one, but I can't really hand MS a pass on that either. They both went far too overboard. Sony may have gone so overboard they swam to the next island, but it's kind of irrelevant once you get off the plank. And they're both eating that cost to stay competitive. I can't imagine either thinks it was their best decision, at the moment...Maybe they'll bilk us on accessory storage to make up the cost later, which would suck.

@BANJO Yep, exactly. That was arguably the thing that really sold me on the XBox ecosystem again, and the idea of all-digital was that convenience. And it spurred me to buy a lot more games. My whole library whenever I want it! It feels like a MASSIVE step backward leaving that behind. Even my Switch does that, albeit with its own expensive, space limited storage solution. I don't think gamers are going to get used to moving games back and forth between drives....we'll put up with it, but we won't get used to it....micromanaging storage devices is the PC world, not the console world. And I wonder how bad ISPs are going to clamp down with the sudden surge in consumer bandwidth consumption this will yield?!?

And it really is at odds with the idea of even Game Pass. I'd have hoped for, moreso MS than Sony, to have a more "smart" solution. Something where maybe you could launch your game from a regular drive and it could "smart deliver" it to the SSD as you played. Or some kind of buffer SSD to stream the assets to and cache them as you play, etc. That would have really been more groundbreaking for the console space than just copying PC and mandating only the most expensive, limited option as the only playable option. This gen feels like a loss-leading prototype war where next gen really fleshes out the tech.

I'm replying to many bear. Where is bird?

@themightyant I'm not a fanboy, I have criticised Xbox One launch. It's you who is cherry-picking and acting in a defensive way with personal attacks like fanboys do, not me.

@NEStalgia Kazooie is awesome!

I was also referring to that video, I don't remember the name, where Mark Cerny, vaguely and inaccurately, explains the technology inside PS5 which raises more questions than answers. The specifications videos that Microsoft have released are much more specific. We know everything about Series X and S at this point.

@BlueOcean All I need to know is if it has the highest quality pixels anyone's ever seen?

I think it's fair to say both companies have had horrible marketing inspired technobabble segments. Instant loading, velocity architecture, whatever Cerny was going on about, we rerouted the plasma flow through the EPS conduits in the starboard Jeffries tube into the main deflector dish to emit and inverse tachyon phase pulse to create an temporal cascade wave effect .....

@NEStalgia Ha ha, fair enough. I really can't wait to see a Digital Foundry comparison of Cyberpunk and Assassin's Creed on Series X, S and PS5. I don't even care about the current generation anymore 😂.

@NEStalgia (Sorry for the late reply)

That's what sold me on the Xbox ecosystem too really, and why I have so many digital titles on my Xbox One... No doubt it is a step back in some ways, as even if a game loads a lot quicker the fact you may have to move it from HDD to SSD to actually play it takes away the convenience...
It's as you say "This gen feels like a loss-leading prototype war where next gen really fleshes out the tech."
Fleshing out the tech comes when SSD prices fall and methods such as streaming everything to be able to play a greater selection of titles is in place...
I think now the best thing which could come to Xbox/Game Pass would be the ability to stream the games as you say some kind of buffer SSDN to stream the assets to and cache them as you play...

High-speed external storage will be the gotcha of next gen.

Everyone's focused on console price with no idea what's coming next.

Between big installs & GamePass, space is going to get tight & expensive.

Wow how did talking about how the xbox storage works to bashing sony... Again
People are obsessed
But i suppose jealousy does that

@playstation_king troll on good man.

This is just too hard to explain to average customers...