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Microsoft has been championing its Game Pass service for years now, and this week the brand finally made its consoles compatible with the entire catalog at once. A recent update made Xbox Series X hard drives of up to 16TB usable with the console, and the crowd went wild. In truth, though, it's not going to be the everyday players who benefit from this update - it's the content creators among us.
Whether you’re sporting an Xbox Series X/S, or a PS5, one of the necessities to having a good time with your beloved console is having plenty of storage. That’s especially the case if you mainly play digital games and are subscribed to every gaming service under the sun. Yet, while you can easily pick up a PS5 SSD from a huge range of brands to give your Sony console a boost, Xbox owners don’t have it as easy.
Only two brands, Western and Digital and Seagate, make the expansion card formatted drives compatible with Xbox consoles, so you’re a lot more limited. Instead, you'll likely be reaching for a larger SSD for gaming, only to slow it down by plugging into a USB slot. See, the size of that hard drive was never really an issue - I want more updates on where I play my games from.
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Modern games have been increasing in size dramatically over the last few years, that’s undeniable. While base games, like Rare’s Sea of Thieves can launch at around 30GB, updates can compound that significantly. Sea of Thieves was a 27GB install on day one, but an update during February 2024 holstered it to 100GB. Today, it's pretty common to start at this position - Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Xbox Series X/S launched at 137.55GB when it was finally ported over. That's before the numerous patches, updates, and DLC that can quickly take your storage hostage and leave you deleting games just to make way for new ones.
I can see why having the option of over 16TB worth of storage at your disposal would be attractive, especially if you want to keep online games like Sea of Thieves permanently on your Xbox to play whenever the moment takes you.
But to put it into context, 16TB is over 116.3 (16000÷137.55) digital copies of Baldur’s Gate 3. And as much as I adore Astarion and his alluring vampire ways, that’s a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3. I don’t know anyone currently (and actively) playing over a hundred fantasy RPGs at any given time, or that many games of any genre for that matter. Even my own personal backlog, which gets worse every day, is not enough to warrant over 16,000GB of space.
There is definitely a benefit to having all your recently played games installed in one place. That way you can dive right back in as the moment suits you. I know I struggle to archive games - who knows if, in a few weeks time, I won’t be itching to replay and will have to sit and wait as such a huge file redownloads all over again. Even though I haven’t touched it in months, I actively refuse to delete Fortnite on my PS5 as it’s over 90GB worth of a slow download that I don’t have the patience to wait for again.
Where this new announcement from Microsoft feels even truly impractical is that you can’t run all games through a USB drive (some manage to slip through the cracks). Instead, you have to move your game over to the Xbox Series X/S’s SSD or expansion card to play it. So while Microsoft has rolled out the support for larger USB drives, that’s over 16TB worth of games you still have to transfer over to your main console storage to run in the first place. I would have been singing a different tune if Microsoft had given the Xbox the same grace it does PC, where you can easily store and play as many games as you like from the best external hard drives on the market.
There is one circumstance where I can see having compatibility with such a vast amount of storage might come in handy. Those who love saving long stretches of gameplay for sharing with their friends online or creating their own content, could very much benefit from fewer limitations with storage. At the time of writing, Seagate has a 20TB external drive on the market, which is definitely not cheap, but would be plenty of space to constantly save long Sea of Thieves clips.
I regularly save Dead by Daylight online matches with friends to watch (and laugh at) later on, and with entire matches easily taking upwards of 30 minutes, that can take a lot of storage space. Especially as the Xbox Series X saves video clips by default at a 4K resolution.
Having new compatibility with extra storage is never a bad thing - and I’m sure there are people out there who will actually benefit from Microsoft adding this new support. Otherwise, why would they be taking the time to integrate it in the first place? At least it’s shown me that there are Xbox fans out there who need even 20TB worth of space to download their games. Which, in turn, means there are people with worse gaming backlogs than me and I’m more than okay with that.
We're also rounding up all the best Xbox One external hard drives and the best PS5 external hard drives. Or, for more Microsoft kit, check out the best Xbox Series X accessories on the market.
