For better or (mostly) worse, the only way to fully increase the storage of an Xbox Series X/S is to use a proprietary expansion card. Three and a half years into the consoles’ lives, there remain only two official solutions: Seagate’s Storage Expansion Card and the WD Black C50. It’s a limiting situation, but if you’re tired of deleting and reinstalling games to create space, versions of each card are at least a little cheaper than usual right now. The 1TB WD Black C50 is on sale for $125 at Amazon, while the 2TB Seagate Storage Expansion Card is down to $230 at Amazon and Best Buy.
The former is $5 more than the lowest price we’ve ever seen, but it’s still $25 off the card’s usual street price. We’ll note that Seagate’s 1TB model has technically dropped as low as $90 a few times before, but those offers have typically sold out extremely fast; as of this writing, that drive costs $140. The discount on the 2TB Seagate card, meanwhile, matches the best price we’ve tracked. That one normally goes for $250. Since WD doesn’t sell a 2TB card, it’s also the highest-capacity option you can buy. Both of these discounts equal the prices we saw during Black Friday last year.
To reiterate, these aren’t great prices in the context of the wider storage market. Sony lets you upgrade the PlayStation 5 with a much wider range of traditional M.2 SSDs, almost all of which are available for significantly less per gigabyte. The top pick in our PS5 SSD buying guide, for instance, currently costs $90 for 1TB or $158 for 2TB. This is despite the fact that consumer SSD prices have generally increased over the past few months.
If you own a recent Xbox, though, you don’t have much choice. You can use a standard external drive to store Series X/S games or run backwards-compatible titles from the Xbox One and older consoles, but the only way to play current-gen games is via internal storage or one of these official cards. That said, the cards themselves are just about as fast as that internal SSD, and setting them up is a breeze: You simply plug the tiny device into the Xbox’s expansion slot, and you’re good to go. The sticker shock is the one major negative, but these discounts should lighten the load somewhat.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/xbox-series-xs-storage-expansion-cards-from-wd-and-seagate-are-discounted-right-now-163525697.html?src=rss
