We're now past the four-year mark in the Xbox Series X|S generation, and we still only have two manufacturers creating Expansion Cards for both consoles. That's not great - but at least a new variant has arrived this week!
WD Black has quietly released the 2TB version of its Xbox Expansion Card to retailers over the past few days, following on from the 512GB and 1TB versions that arrived in June of last year. The lowest price you'll find for it at the moment is $199.99 / £213.99 via the SanDisk website, and that includes a month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
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It's true that you can also find Seagate's 2TB Xbox Expansion Card for around the same price right now, but perhaps that's because of this new WD Black variant. Simply put, we've seen plenty of improved deals on Xbox Expansion Cards ever since WD Black started making them, and it makes sense - competition usually leads to better prices!
So, even if you're not interested in paying $200 for a 2TB Expansion Card right now, this is still news to be celebrated - it means more choice, greater availability and better prices moving forward. The next thing we're hoping for is to see a third manufacturer entering the market, significantly raising the potential of some bargain deals in the future.
Have you bought an Xbox Expansion Card in 2024? Let us know about your experience with it below.
Comments 26
Series X is a brilliant bit of kit, but this is the one thing I think they got wrong on the hardware. Because of the price of high-end expandable storage they should have gone with off the shelf m.2 nvme gen4 drives which are half the cost or less. They could have still had Xbox branded ones for those who didn't want to do the research.
I get there are a few people who might prefer this as they can unplug them and plug it into a second Xbox Series console, or hotswap, but you can't please all and a lower price would have been more welcome than the few benefits. Perhaps next gen they will take a different strategy.
The hard part for me is that I use NVMe drives in USB enclosures, which let me copy games within minutes, and I’m fine with that solution. I’ve never been a fan of proprietary storage for consoles—it was a real mood killer for the PS Vita too. Plus, I'm not sure if investing in a storage module now means it’ll be compatible with future consoles. So, in the end, these workarounds work well enough for me.
Still £60 too expensive.
Shame because the Series X ssd isn't as fast as Sony's and so you wouldn't have even needed a gen 4 ssd to upgrade if they had gone the same route as PS.
Meaning it could have been cheaper still.
So glad Sony went the non-proprietary route.
Odd how MS is just in love with these non-industry-standard drive expansions. Didn’t they do the same thing in the 360 era?
Meanwhile I could replace my PS3 and PS4’s internal hard drives with an off the shelf drive and didn’t void any warranties doing so, and stick a standard m.2 SSD into my PS5 with no issues.
The only things these cards have an edge on is installation speed, just insert into console.
(And yes, I do have a 1 TB card for my series X, annoyingly!)
Can you run the games directly off the Xbox Expansion Card?
I thought you couldn't or am i confusing it with another system?
Great if you want extra room and simple plug & play but I’m quite happy with a much cheaper 4TB external SSD for all XBSX ‘Gen9 aware’, XB1, 360 & OG XB games.
Plenty of room left over to store/shuffle XBSX titles when space gets tight. It’s fast too, so no hassle when stuff needs moving.
@johnK - yes, all games will run off one of these ‘official’ expansion cards.
@johnK All games will run off the expansion cards.
You might be thinking of external hard drives. Only XBone/360 games will run off those, along with a VERY tiny number of X/S optimized games like the MCC.
@johnK you can't run Xbox Series games off of an external hard drive connected via USB.
@Feffster @dskatter
Thanks.
@dskatter Yes, but then take into account Sony lock you into their Digital store for everything, the money you save on the expansion is soon grabbed back when you want to buy PS Plus subscriptions or digital games.
Microsoft don't lock you to their store they allow you to buy full Digital games and subscriptions from 3rd party's giving you the best prices, 3rd party subscriptions are far cheaper, so you get all those day One AAA games on Ultimate Gamepass for one cheap subscription price, whereas they cost you £70 each on PS5 no matter what more expensive PS Plus Store subscription you have.
Then there is the fact that most First Party AAA games on Ultimate Gamepass can also be played on PC etc as well as Xbox at no extra cost.
Sony even make you buy a subscription for cloud saves, they are Free on Xbox.
@Rog-X good point as much as I saved being able to buy a non proprietary SSD for my PS5, I have saved much more then that being able to buy Xbox games from the different CD Key sites for dirt cheap lol
@Rog-X Not a compelling defense of proprietary hardware, in a world where I can save even more money by buying physical media.
Weird hill to die on defending proprietary hardware choices, though.
Here we are 4 years after this generation of consoles are released and game sizes keep ballooning while storage on the consoles is just going up in comparatively small increments. It is super disappointing to me that we don't have affordable expansion cards that are equal to the largest SSD drives. aka I would like to see at least 8TB NVMe expansion drives instead of a measly 2 TB.
I hate managing storage. It takes away from my gaming time and is just a super annoying task. One of the reasons I game on console is to get away from managing the device. With these super small and high priced expansion cards it is making console gaming look more and more like PC gaming.
@NeoRatt In fairness, a non-proprietary 8 TB M.2 SSD is around $750. SSDs aren’t cheap, especially at the speeds required for this gen of consoles.
I really don’t feel like paying that much for the ability to save a few more games. An external 8 TB hard drive and doing some storage shuffling is a much more cost-effective solution no matter how much you and I hate shuffling. Maybe when the PS6 and (whatever MS chooses to release) come out prices will have dropped substantially!
@themightyant : The fact that you can unplug it while the console is on and hot swap it with another on the fly is certainly worth the price.
I can't imagine stopping my gaming sessions, shutting down the console and then taking it apart and then doing it all over again just to add memory in 2024.
Heck even Sony knew better with the PS1.
@Major_Player As I said they can’t please everyone and some people will like hot swapping and being able to carry it around. But the cost of that is literally DOUBLE the price or more on a very expensive item for what it is.
I suspect the vast majority of players install it ONCE and then never touch it again and hence would prefer this to be cheaper over that small convenience, but not all, some like you like it as is, that’s fair enough.
@dskatter
All this storage needs to be more affordable as well. I do not like the fact that both SSD and NVMe are so expensive as compared to SATA traditional drives.
@NeoRatt You…are underestimating the current cost and difficulty of manufacturing these in comparison to standard hard drives, me thinks. As time goes on they will be, but until then…us peasants will have to make do!
I think the SSD memory cards for the series Xbox are overpriced, even with the discount. If you have a memory card costing close to the price of the S and about half the price of the X it's almost better to just get a upgrade in the console itself rather then spend the money on a memory card. And much of the cost is due to MS using micro SSD cards designed for laptops rather then normal SSD used for desktop computers.
There's a lot of the obvious Xbox this gen should have used the industry standard NVMe, but I don't think that'd be a clear winner either. For one it wasn't an option for at least a year (or otherwise a while) for even PS and for two, speaking for the casual perspective, yeah I don't care how easy it is I never want to HAVE to get a screwdriver and crack open my game console to get more storage.
I think the expansion are a good idea for what they are but face the glaring issue of being proprietary, so as consumers we're lacking options both in terms of price and the amount of expanded storage. To think there's a very easy fix for this going forward.
1) Don't abandon the expansion cards. If they support multiple generations then we'll naturally see much better pricing. Beyond that abandoning them next hardware will be a massive middle finger to anyone who invested in one. There's almost a similar issue this gen, but even while prior external SSDs and HDDs won't run current gen games you can still use them. Whereas the expansion card is dependent on them keeping that slot. If they do keep the slot, I think they could benefit a lot from having a literal plug and play option that does cost more but is far more convenient. I could also see it working incredibly well with the potential handheld considering the size of the cards.
2) Support internal NVMe SSDs (or whatever storage options there are in the future). But beyond that Microsoft keeps insisting on repairibility and being the consumer friendly console. Make the Xbox not just repairable but upgradable. Especially if they want to break away from the idea of Pro models. They could even sell the parts to upgrade themselves (instead of manufacturing a full blown pro model). I say if power gamers want to take a screwdriver to their console and give it a nitrous boost, let them. Then let those of us who are happy being sheep and willing to pay more for less work and even less thought do so.
I'd also say it's worth considering how there's more movement within the Xbox ecosystem due to the free cloud saves and a possible handheld. Like I'm sure I'm not the majority Xbox user in doing this, but I'm also sure it's just straight up discouraged on PS, but I'm constantly switching between my Series X and Series S and I only use the same expansion card between them. I wouldn't WANT to take a screw driver and install, take out, and reinstall the SSD everytime I swap between them. Something portable I can slot in suits my needs and I don't mind paying more for it. The only thing stopping me from buying another isn't the price, but concern it'll be useless next console. I know that's not everyone though and I say gamers who want it, should be able to take a screwdriver and go to town on their Xbox. Frankly the same with games. It's crazy to me how we don't have more advanced settings this gen like PC for those who want them if consoles are supposed to be so powerful. Like why is monster hunter rise not the norm?
@WildConcept6 It was just over half a year until the first Compatible NVMe drives were usable on PS5 (July 2021), some drives that worked were actually available earlier but Sony only released a patch that enabled them then. But that was for the slightly faster proper gen4 drives that PS5 required. There were slower drives available at launch that should have been usable on Xbox which is significantly slower (2.4GB/s vs 5.5GB/s) and potentially cheaper.
You could also argue that in the first 6 months how many REALLY needed extra storage for next gen games when the console had just released there simply weren't that many games to fill the drive, this is something that became more needed over time.
I like the idea of having both in theory... but that will add to the cost of the console.
As for whether the current Xbox cards will be compatible next gen... I don't know. One trouble with Xbox going with the slower speeds is that it will be slightly outdated by then, the 2.4GB/s will be very slow compared with Gen 4 (up to 8GB/s) and Gen 5 (up to 14.5GB/s) speeds. Do they want to put yesterday's tech in tomorrow's console?
I accept that some users like you hotswap the drives between multiple consoles, but I would suspect that is a severe minority of users, most likely plug it into the back as extra storage ONCE and then never touch it again. Should they pay twice the price to accommodate users like you? It's a tough one there's pro and cons on each side, I just think these are prohibitively expensive and so cost should have been the key factor. ymmv
$200 is such a wild price to pay for storage. But I guess since I don't really buy games on Xbox (I use MS rewards almost exclusively to buy games on the XSX) I don't have much to complain about.
@themightyant They can just be used for backwards compatible games, as USB SSD/HDD are today. The important bit is that the hardware is compatible with them, else loyal customers like me who invested in one will be screwed over and it will generate a lot of e-waste. So yes, next device should be compatible with both the cards and NVME drives in my (admittedly biased) opinion.
Still abhorrently overpriced. I paid £67 for a 2TB WD M.2 from Aliexpress for my PS5 and it's been great.
@dskatter Doesn't matter if you buy physical media. The game still installs to your drive. The physical disc is just your license.
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