Microsoft revealed earlier today the price of their expandable storage of 1TB for it’s next-gen consoles. The storage will be released on November 10th but will soon be available for pre-orders globally. The SSD drive is currently proprietary and only Seagate has been announced as a manufacturer. To be fair, these prices look higher as compared to other SSDs available in the market, however Microsoft has provided a statement to support the tag.
Microsoft’s Jason Ronald said, “The Xbox Velocity Architecture is a key innovation of our next generation consoles, delivering unprecedented speed and performance enabling transformative gaming experiences never before possible on console. This level of consistent, sustained performance requires advanced components which comes at a higher cost than traditional hard drives or SSDs often found in PCs. By partnering with an industry leader in Seagate, we worked together to deliver an expandable storage solution which delivers identical performance at the lowest cost possible and available this holiday.” This explains that while SSDs with similar specifications might be available in the market, the higher price of the expandable card is due to the unique performance that it has promised.
In US, the Series X is priced at $499 with 1TB of internal storage and Series S at $299 with 512GB of internal storage. This means that a combination of Series S with the expansion would make it costlier than it’s more powerful version. While the smaller version comes without an optical drive, the games for Series S will be optimized to take less space than they would on Series X. As a result, there is no immediate need to purchase an expandable card with it. However, 512GB is clearly not enough space if you wish to play multiple games, one after the other. As a result, investment in a storage will be likely for gamers on Series S.
There is an option of using a standard HDD attached to the console for expanded storage, however they will not allow games optimized for Series X/S to be launched. This means that while older generations’ games will be playable on an external HDD, all new gen games need to be either on the internal storage or will require the expandable SSD. The reason for this is the Velocity Architecture. Considering the taxes in India, the price of the storage will not be a direct conversion from USD to INR and therefore requires us to be more patient for the price reveal. The product will come with a 3 year warranty, as said on the Seagate website.
