Microsoft has come to its senses: The exclusive agreement with Seagate will apparently end soon. Consequence for owners of an Xbox Series X|S: cheaper cards for memory expansion. An example from the U.S. now shows how cheap it can be.
Ever larger game worlds, 4K graphics and ray tracing take their toll: AAA titles like Call of Duty eat up a lot of memory. Even the Xbox Series X with its 1 TB of memory quickly reaches its limits, especially since the user only has about 800 GB available anyway. Expansion cards, which expand the storage by up to 2 TB, are a remedy. However, they really cost money and are only available from Seagate – at least so far.
Xbox Series X|S: Cheaper memory cards from Western Digital to come
Storage expansion cards from Western Digital have now been discovered at the US electronics retailer Best Buy. They cost 180 US dollars for 1 TB of storage and thus clearly undercut the offer from Seagate for 220 US dollars. Buyers can thus save 40 US dollars (source: Windows Central).
In the meantime, the product page in the online store has been removed again. However, the price, storage capacity and pictures (see above) were saved by attentive users. Visually, the variant from Western Digital doesn’t look as stylish as the Seagate card. However, since the expansion cards are inserted on the back of the Xbox anyway, this should not bother most people.
It is not known when Microsoft and Western Digital will officially introduce the new storage expansion cards. However, the listing in Best Buy’s online store is an indication that it shouldn’t take too much longer. Owners of the consoles had to wait almost three years for memory cards that did not come from Seagate. Hopefully, with the end of the exclusivity, more manufacturers will offer their own expansion cards – and thus the prices will drop further.
Expanding the memory of the Xbox Series X|S
The memory of the Xbox Series X|S can not only be expanded with expansion cards. Regular hard drives or SSDs can also be used. The only catch: Besides the lower speed, games developed for the Xbox Series X|S cannot be started from a hard drive or SSD. They have to be moved to the console’s internal SSD beforehand.
