The Xbox Series console duo, with a proprietary and distinctly expensive storage solution (unlike the PlayStation 5), is about to see a monopoly’s end.

There’s nothing worse than when a company has no rival so that it can raise prices at will, and so far, there hasn’t been much competition between the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S storage expansion solutions, as no one has competed against Seagate’s PCIe 4.0 storage with a maximum of 2 TB of space. It can be connected uniquely, so you can’t just loosely stuff a 2280 format NVMe M.2 SSD into its dedicated slot, as you can on the PlayStation 5 after a bit of assembly.

A product called WD_Black C50 Expansion Card For Xbox has popped up on Best Buy’s website (it will most likely throw an error message, but since US stores have a penchant for geoblocking, maybe that’s why…), so another manufacturer besides Seagate sees potential in the Xbox Series “card” solution. Western Digital’s 1 TB card will cost $180, cheaper than Seagate’s product ($220), and it tends to be in stock less often.

With this extra storage on Microsoft consoles, you can also use the Quick Resume feature so that you can store the saved state of your games on the “cards,” so it’s not “cold storage,” which is, for example, an external USB drive where you have to copy the game to the internal storage of the console or to a Seagate (possibly soon to be Western Digital, too) product, and older games can simply be run from the hard drive. On the positive side, Microsoft’s approach is a reasonable affair: plug and play with the expected performance. And with the PlayStation 5, it depends on the manufacturer and model…

The only unusual thing is that for more than two years, only Seagate has been behind Microsoft with the extra storage. Will others follow Western Digital?

Source: VGC