The well-known brand Western Digital may soon introduce a new 1TB expansion card for Xbox Series consoles that is considerably cheaper than its competitors. Called “WD_BLACK C50 Expansion Card for Xbox”, the not-yet-released product has recently been listed on Best Buy’s website but is currently unavailable for purchase. It was designed to expand the storage of Xbox Series consoles by a whopping 1TB.
The Xbox Series consoles launched back in 2020 with a proprietary memory card system to increase the machines’ storage capacity and at launch, Seagate offered 1TB, 2TB, and 512GB cards. This new card will cost $179.99, which is significantly less expensive than Microsoft’s 1TB card, which retails for $220 (although it is often out of stock).
Seagate offers expansion to the Xbox Series charging $220 for 1 TB. The new WD card will cost $179.99.
While the Series consoles offer other memory expansion options or the ability to store games on third-party hard drives, the expansion card system is unique in that it is fully compatible with Xbox’s Quick Resume feature, which means that games can be stored in a playable state directly on the expansion cards rather than on typical USB hard drives (that store games in “cold storage”). USB drives can still be used to store games, but users need to copy them into the system’s internal storage or one of these expansion cards to play Xbox Series games; older titles can run natively from the HDD.
In contrast, the PS5 uses “generic hard drives” produced by multiple manufacturers for its storage expansion, which generally means that expansion prices are lower than on Xbox but this ends up delivering inconsistent performance between hard drives, requiring the user to do some research before purchases (unlike Microsoft’s “plug-and-play” solution).
We still don’t have any release dates for the yet-to-be-announced product but, since the leak showed up recently, we may not have to wait for a long time. Let’s keep our eyes open in the next couple of days!
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