Ever since the Redmond, Washington-based software giant announced details about the ‘Velocity Drive’ storage architecture that’s engineered into its new Xbox family, we thought it sounded expensive. Well, as it turns out, we were right. Twitter searcher-of-deals by the name of ‘Wario64’ mentioned that he saw a Best Buy listing that showed Seagate’s 1TB expansion SSD priced at $220.
That price is what you would expect to pay for a high-end desktop PC SSD. It’s important to note that While Microsoft did confirm that older games will be able to be played from USB-connected storage devices, new games will have to be either installed on an officially-licensed storage device or the Xbox’s internal SSD. This limitation was put in place by Microsoft in order to maintain a high level of user-experience. On the other end of the next-gen-control spectrum, if you’re in the market for a PS5, Sony said that it will support ‘certified’ M.2 NVMe SSDs that can be installed internally.
Seagate – 1TB Game Drive for Xbox Series X and Series S External Custom PCI Express Gen4 x2 (NVMe) Solid State Drive is up for preorder at Best Buy ($219.99) https://t.co/LzdBZ0dUFT pic.twitter.com/FFVWl1Tmvr
— Wario64 (@Wario64) September 24, 2020
That means that the cost of expanded storage is around two-thirds of the price of the system itself. Adding storage that is this expensive may not be attractive to most of the kind of people that would be a lower-end console, but if you want to install all those AAA titles that are going to be available at launch, you may have to have no choice but the purchase one.
