Seagate announces Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X

Earlier today, Microsoft revealed a ton of new information about its upcoming new game console -- the terribly named Xbox Series X. This is just three months after the game system was first unveiled to the world. Despite its terrible name, the Xbox Series X is looking to be an incredibly powerful console. The AMD-powered system features 12 Teraflops of power, 4K gaming, and an insane 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

The Xbox Series X will come with a super-fast 1TB SSD too, which sounds like a lot of capacity, but it really isn't. Look, with more and more people downloading games and forgoing optical disks, a terabyte of storage will fill up very quickly. Thankfully, Xbox Series X has a special storage expansion port on the rear that will allow owners to easily increase capacity without opening up the device. Best of all, this port will apparently allow the same speed as the internal drive. Unfortunately, however, Microsoft has opted for a proprietary port -- one that will only work with this console.

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Is a proprietary port bad? Not necessarily, but it does likely mean consumers will probably have to pay higher prices as a result. You see, companies that develop drives for this port will likely have to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft. Not to mention, if the owner decides to sell their Xbox Series X, they may not be able to re-purpose the proprietary SSD for, say, their PC. The drive could end up being an expensive paperweight.

With all of that said, one of the most trusted names in storage, Seagate, announces that it will be offering its own Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X. For whatever reason, Microsoft seems to be limiting the Storage Expansion Card drives to 1TB -- at least for now. As a result, Seagate is only announcing a 1TB drive. Hopefully there will be larger capacity drives, such as 2TB, in the future, although it seems like Microsoft is hoping consumers will buy and swap multiple 1TB drives.

Seagate says the following.

Built in partnership with Xbox, the Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X is a 1TB custom storage solution that expands the capacity of Xbox Series X—seamlessly replicating the full speed and performance of the Series X’s internal storage.

As with the Xbox Series X, we have no idea when the 1TB Seagate Storage Expansion Card will be available, nor do we know how much it will cost. We do know one thing for sure though -- hardcore gamers will almost certainly need to purchase one of these drives, as the internal SSD will run out of room very quickly. If you are interested in eventually buying the drive, you can sign up for email updates here.