Xbox Announces Permanent Price Cut For Series X|S Storage Expansion Cards

Glad I held out on buying one.

Woooooo this is very positive news! Fingers crossed it is in other territories outside the US as well but at the very least it’s the beginning of the change

Wow that's a big price cut, quite unexpected with the current markets.
Maybe their profit marges were just that big 🤔

A much needed price cut, now the 2TB isn't so pointlessly expensive.

Good. Freaking. God.
This took way too long.

never really felt the need for one i just use a 5tb external harddrive for storage of games

Big news. I mean they’re still overpriced but if I can save up enough Microsoft rewards points and get one for a heavy discount, I might crack.

We can only hope that with other manufacturers making them soon that the prices keep going down.

Geeze, finally! I got mine at launch and don't need it, but man that too ridiculously forever.

Redfall is doing wonders for XB already!

@Cherip-the-Ripper It's actually still overpriced compared to off the shelf SSDs (of higher performance!), so yeah, that was all margin.

@SplooshDmg no joke. It’s finally starting to get into poor girl living on the lam in Mexico territory

I don't need the cards but if I could get 1TB under $100 CAD i might get it for convenience one day. At this price it's still too much as it would be $200 taxes in....so eeewwwwww!

@NEStalgia Redfall should start getting better reviews if that's the case.

Dont have the games to use up my series s space anyway. Pass

Id still wait for a sale on those lol

Oh thank goodness! I've been out of space for 2 years now.

The initial price successfully trained me to live without more storage. Making space for Jedi Survivor's absurd file size didn't even phase me.

Better, but still overpriced.

@trev666 I have a 10TB external. Still not E ough space when so man games needlessly require faster storage that play perfectly fine on say, a 7200rpm HDD.

About time - I think I paid around those prices for my 1 and 2TB cards in Black Friday sales. I know I got my 2TB for a 'bit' less last Black Friday so I expected them to 'drop' sooner. I think its more to do with some 'exclusivity' deal Seagate had with MS, but with WD 'competing', Seagate now have Competition to drive their prices down.

As for 'others' and their pricing, Yes you can buy some 'unknown' brand without a Heatsink and/or potentially 'faster' in theory for less, but it still requires a Heat sink for safe and long lasting Storage. MS's design incorporates cooling.

Speed is only part of the equation. If the CPU bottlenecks as it can't decompress the data quick enough, you'll never reach that 'speed' anyway. MS's solution is more interesting, although perhaps 'more' work too. Sampler Feedback is supposed to be 'intelligently' downloading 'only' the most important Data, part of a 'whole' texture that you as a player will see, thus reducing the amount of data 'required'. If a game needs 20GB of data transferred to 'load' that level but the CPU can only decompress 4GB per second, it doesn't matter if your SSD can shift 7.5GB/s, its held up. Sampler feedback can reduce that data by upto 40%, so in this case, would save '2s' in loading time (4GB/s due to decompression speeds with 20GB takes 5s, 12GB would be 3s). So whether you have a 7.5GB/s or 4.5GB/s SSD, without Sampler Feedback, its not making any difference but again, probably requires devs to set it up to use Direct Storage and Sampler Feedback - designed to reduce the amount of data and how its accessed to reduce the amount of Data that is clogging up resources...

Its similar to HDMI cables. Just because your Series X has a HDMI 2.1 port capable of shifting up to 48Gbps between your console and the TV, If the TV only has 2.0, it limits the amount of data it can receive to 2.0 standards (upto 18Gbps) but put a 'basic' HDMI cable between the Console and the TV, that limits the speed/amount of data that can be sent every second...

IF Sony built their System around '5.5GB/s' of its internal SSD, then putting a 500GB/s SSD would be 'pointless' as the system would hamstring its performance capability...

Quick check, these cards can also be used with Series X yes?

I bought a 512 GB on ebay for roughly the new prices. This is back when I had just for the Xbox and was trying out all sorts of games on GP because I hadn't had a modern system in 10 years. I was always deleting things. Now that I've settled down and have a better idea of what I like playing, I don't really need the card, but it's handy to have for the XSS.

@BAMozzy Super interesting. Thanks for the explanation

@NEStalgia "Redfall is doing wonders for XB already!"

I'm normally not a big fan of the tidal wave of negativity and cynical takes around here, but I couldn't help but chuckle at this, lol. Well done.

Awesome news, much more reasonable. Still a bit pricey but moving in the right direction

I got my 1TB off a friend for $80 bucks and i love how easy it is to use. Works really well, only thing that was holding these back was price, so this is good news.

That’s a big price cut, telling me the only reason they were priced as high was they wanted to milk all they could put of that exclusivity.

I’ll look forward to when the competition actually hits the shelves and they start doing sales for holidays.

That's more like it, the plug and play is so useful if you want to play on another Series X/S elsewhere.

That’s the price that should’ve been originally

@Tharsman Clearly Western Digital is trying to build a monopoly on the new market of 3rd party Xbox SSDs and will cause irreparable damage to Seagate. They must be stopped!

Console price drop in fall

I noticed Argos and Curry’s in the U.K. seem to have reduced their prices for these a little. £150 for a 1TB, not surprising as it’s $149.99 in the US, we normally get ripped off a little on electronics here.

What I don’t understand is they all seem to be out of stock atm? I have been after a 1 or 2TB one for the measly storage available in my Series S

I got my 1 TB for free with a Microsoft Retail program I was apart of, but the 2 TB dropping that much in cost makes it tempting to upgrade lol

Tempting to buy another 1tb one just for Flight SIM

Now that this is finally getting closer to affordable, I get to repeat this: damned port should had been in the front of the console, not the back.

I would like to be able to keep a single copy of games installed in the thing and being able to unplug it from one Xbox to the other if I decide to go play on the livingroom or the office. Reaching behind the XSX is an annoyance. The XSS is standing up looking like a white speaker, though, so technically the "behind" is on the side, so not THAT bad.

This is an oof for me having just bought one in February.

I got one in October.
Too bad the XSeX didn't come with two ports so we could use two cards at the same time.

They're still about double what they should be.

@BrilliantBill Yes, The Series S and X.

I'd feel happier about dropping serious coin for a 2tb card if I knew it would also be supported on the next gen of consoles.

I guess my price of £139 bought last weekend from Currys doesn't now seem that good. But is that the UK price for 1TB now then? Which would make the 2TB £199

They're REALLY trying to get some good PR right now

Woah, finally. And they're still expensive. I got a 2TB Firecuda for my PS5 for 186€ and that's M2 SSD 😁

I actually was looking to buy one the day before they dropped the price. I was looking at Mercari for a deal. Decided to look more the next day and got a new 1TB for $149 from Target. Glad I had waited a day. Now my S has more storage than my X.

Currys (UK) now listing 2tb at £199... But showing as out of stock.

@NEStalgia Ha, that was my first thought. The last time xbox had such bad faith with customers they finally made F2P games actually F2P.
I don’t think this was a PR move by them, though the timings great, but would have been awesome if for all Phils talk the other day about how they’re beyond the console now and want us all feeling like first class citizens on ‘Xbox’, would have been great to announce free mp for console

Long overdue but welcome, even if there’s clearly room to go lower. Hopefully WD still wants to undercut Seagate and can trigger a bit of competitive price drops in the process. My assumption is these things will basically just be differentiated on price and whoever is more expensive will struggle to compete.

@Smigit

TBH, i'm expecting Seagate and WD to exactly match each other on price... I think the only difference for the consumer will be which one has stock availability at any given time.

I got 2 x 1TB card off eBay early last year, £120 & £150, seen quite a few at that kind of price recently

@Bleachedsmiles Very true!

Still $100 too much in majority those offerings.

Still seems expensive. But I don't need it as I rarely run out of space. I'll delete what I don't play.

1TB is still for 278USD. if i want it in hungary DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

@soimun All UK prices include VAT, but US prices have a state-specific checkout tax in addition to the RRP. Only five states do not charge sales tax on electronic goods. The "real" price in most states varies between $175.50 and $190.50. Naturally, there are several additional considerations to keep in mind when exchanging currencies, but the UK receives a very fair deal compared to the Eurozone, Australia, South America, and Asia where regional pricing is applied.

I bought the 1TB on sale in Dec. 2020. The total was $187 with no sales tax. It brought great utility over the years. I also use a couple SATA SSDs for back-compat games. If I had somehow waited, today I would go for the 2TB card at $279. There will undoubtedly be further store-specific discounts/sales.

@Sifi I don't remember it took so long on PS5, maybe a half year.
The price increase of the PS5 doesn't change a thing about the fact, that a less good SSD costs way more.
And do you really take the XBox SSD to your friends place? Is this really an advantage?

@Sifi ok, than in your case it's a plus with plug and play mechanic.