
The current limit for external hard drive size on Xbox is already pretty big, but the team is expanding that capability, starting out with Xbox Insiders this month. Microsoft's current limit of 16TB will soon be removed - allowing players to utilise even more storage space on Xbox in 2025.
Going off the team's wording on this, it sounds like there'll be no hard limit on storage size once this restriction has been removed. Xbox drives will simply create more partitions for storage - with each partition showing up as a separate device on your console even if you're just using one massive drive.
"We are enabling support for external USB drives larger than 16TB, so you can be sure your favorite games are always ready to play! Newly formatted drives that are larger than 16TB will be formatted with multiple partitions to utilize all available space for games and apps. These will appear as multiple devices in the storage devices list."
Microsoft also notes that if you've already been using a bigger drive that your Xbox console has capped to 16TB, you'll have re-format it to take advantage of storage capacity beyond that number. This new feature is rolling out today for the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring of Xbox Insiders, before eventually being available to all users in the coming weeks.
If you happen to still store loads of games on a big external hard drive, this feature could come in handy, even if that level of storage size seems a bit mental to us! We're mostly using SSD space on Xbox Series X|S these days, which is of course nowhere near the previous 16TB cap anyway.
Will any of you be making use of UNLIMITED STORAGE POWER? Tell us what the heck you're storing on your Xbox consoles down below.
[source support.xbox.com]
Comments 25
My Series X has a 1tb expansion card and I also have the Seagate 8TB Game Drive and still have room didn't think 16TB drive was a thing.
16tb should be enough storage for anyone really!!
I have loads of space on my series x with a 512gb expansion card no need for anymore memory for me!
They really do some good things over at Xbox console development to be fair, quick resume being one of my favourites.
So why the hell don’t they promote this great console and GPU and Xbox studios games more as a best way to play console package.
You know the full developers intentions, 4K, 60fps, HDR, VRR, Dolby Vision and Atmos etc.
All the great ingredients are there now with recent studio purchases just starring Microsoft in the face.
I would be more happy, if the 2GB SSDs would be cheaper.
Even with an additional XBox 1TB SSD, I still struggle with space for Series X games.
How about fixing Quick Resume instead of pointless nonsense like this?
Great, and now fix "install anyway", so we can actually download new games to all that space.
This mostly just seems like future proofing (though I have to wonder who is even able to test this), but is a welcome addition nonetheless. Hopefully the next Xbox includes more support for SSS and doesn't get rid of the expansion cards. Supporting external drives, the proprietary SSS cards (for the "best") experiences, and any Nvme (or m.2 or whatever it's called) would be the best of all three worlds.
@OldGamer999 Have you met Microsoft marketing? It's pretty much just two sticks and an analytical data spreadsheet. Windows and Microsoft Office would probably be unknown if they weren't such old trailblazers that have become entrenched.
I'm a little confused, @Kezelpaso, which is not something new! Currently, I have the internal 1TB, and the official 2TB. I also have two external 8TB hard drives attached via a 4 port USB extension device. So I have two questions;
1. Am I accessing all 19TB with all the storage, or is it capped at 16TB? Or does the 16TB cap only refer to the external hard drives?
2. I did try to add a third 8TB hard drive but was unable to get it to work, is the cap the reason?
Thanks for the article. It is indeed food for thought...
I would be able to test this, @WildConcept6. I currently have two 8TB external hard drives, plus a 2TB official hard drive attached to my X. I have over 1600 games, but a couple of hundred are not installed simply because I don't have the space for them as pretty much all my memory is used up... 🤪
The external HD size isn't the problem. The capped SSD storage is. This seems more like a work-around so we can technically Download everything to the HD and then Migrate it to the SSD for playing.
Migration takes so f'ing long though... Maybe I'm just better off with my ISP than most others, but it's actually quicker for me to just re-download stuff. (But I do get that others have data caps, which I do not.)
@WildConcept6
You have good point about windows and office and being so entrenched.
Perhaps some daft person at Microsoft thinks that they can treat the xbox gaming universe the same way from a PR point of and really does not realise the competition in this area.
Always nice to have more options, but this is an incredibly niche use case it has to be said. An 18TB portable USB HDD from Argos costs £315! It’s very hard to imagine many Xbox users going that extreme on HDD storage when modern games benefit so much from SSD.
Now if they could permit XSX games to run from SATA SSD that would be genuinely useful to the masses. Don’t tell me games like Sonic x Shadow Generations and Another Crab’s Treasure need NVME speeds, they run on Switch after all! In fact when you look at PC virtually every game is fine with SATA SSD. I suspect the issue is the Xbox OS is unable to detect what is SSD and what is HDD via USB connection, and if so that’s a real shame.
Edit: thinking about it couldn’t they just run a mandatory storage speed test on the USB drive? So probably an intentional limitation to sell more expansion cards - boo!
The xbox os is slowly becoming a pc
@Cakefish I was wondering if it was just my external hdd couldn't run current gen games on the XSX. I can play ONE and 360 games from it though. Am I missing something??
Only the Internal and Expansion cards can play the Series X/S games, @PushButtons...
@Fiendish-Beaver I know
Current max capacity is 3 x 16Tb drives attached + 2TB expansion card
I did try an 18Tb drive a year or so ago, but it would not format as it was bigger than the16Tb individual max, so the comments about having to reformat if using a drive larger than 16Tb seems a bit strange to me
The PS4&5 external storage is only 1 x 8Tb Drive and a nightmare to swap over as the index gets completely messed up when using a drive that has a different set of games on it & re-indexing takes days as it seems to require the console to be powered up on the dashboard. I maxed out my 8Tb back when it was only PS4 games I had to worry about
XBox Series games that are Gen9aware can run off external drives, but can have much longer load times - Sea of Thieves is about a 10 minute load.....
However why games like Pinkman must be on the internal drive baffles me
@Fiendish-Beaver I believe you can already have more than 16TB TOTAL but you couldn't previously have more than 16TB from ONE storage device, e.g. you couldn't plug a 160TB NAS into it. Now you can and it will show up as 10 different 16TB drives on Xbox. (edit)
This is probably useless for 99.99% of the audience, but a small handful of power users might find a use for it, those that want their entire Xbox library of thousands of games always available.
@GlasgowGuy Something isn't right if re-indexing is taking days. I have a 2TB + 1TB + 4TB and it takes minutes.
I've always managed just fine with the internal.
@OldGamer999 no idea lol. Series x is insanely good piece of hardware and OS is great too. As a ps5 PRO owner I like my series x more as a piece of tech.
Its all about support and games tho, so PS it is in the future.
I dont need that much storage but honestly pretty tempted with an idea of galaxy series x with 2tb stick. Even that i dont own one, but I like these ssd sticks that goes into a slot. Such a sleek and cool solution. They are overpriced a little as I dont really need it, but i dont like these wired external ssds.
I dont like where MS is going but prob still buy next xbox if its not a hybrid but a traditionak series x like box. I just like it, I dont know.
And due to GP I still play my xbox often, even that I own PS5 PRO.
@themightyant might just have been me, but the 8Tb I was swapping over seemed to be showing the hard drive icon at the top right of the screen every time I powered it up for a few days. It was easier to keep my PS4 as a VR console & PS4 Pro as my main one
Even then there were times I have had 800gigs free & it would say I didn't have enough space for some relatively small updates. It is easier to delete the game & then do a fresh install.
Frustrating doesn't cover it !! You can't even uninstall DLC from a title - somehow one of the Lego games had DLC showing as installed from another Lego game I didn't own & no easy way to uninstall it - resorted to going with a fresh install
The way the PS external hard drive system works is a mystery to me - even installing to the external drive, I have had messages saying I need to clear space on the internal drive
I have a suspicion that if there is less than, say, 10%of the external drive free it won't let you install & if it is an 8Tb drive thats just under 800gigs- again just a hunch
But as this is an Xbox site I shouldn't be venting here !!
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