Gen 4 NVME drives are expensive
Chalk this one up to our fears being confirmed as the Xbox Series X and S 1TB expandable storage drives have surfaced and it’s damned pricey. Coming in at the tune of $219.99, as spotted over on Best Buy’s website, these things are going to force everyone to rethink how many games are stored on their Xbox Series consoles.
Now, I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment and say that the price is likely justified as the tech being used is pricey. I’ve already seen several posts of people complaining about the pricing, with many of them listing drives that are supposedly the same. Except they aren’t, and many have been posting links to generation 3 NVME Solid State drives and not generation 4 NVME ones. And that is key, as the Xbox Series X/S and even the PlayStation 5 will utilize PCIe 4.0 NVME, not PCIe 3.0 NVME. To put that in perspective, PCIe 4.o is still fairly new, even in the PC space.
A good example of this would be the new Samsung SSD 980 Pro, which was only recently released. This beast of an SSD requires a PCIe 4.0 enabled motherboard, just like the Xbox Series X/S, but the payoff is amazing. We’re talking about insane write/read speeds at 5,000 MB/s and 7000 MB/s, respectfully. It’s also priced at $229. Now, comparing that to the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, a PCIe 3.0 SSD, we’re seeing a write/read of 3300 MB/s and 3500 MB/s. Nearly half in both write and read, showing that there are big gains with PCIe 4.0 NVME drives.
So when you think about that and how much the Xbox expandable storage is priced, it starts to make sense. Still, it’s hard to rationalize that you’re almost paying the price of the Xbox Series S, and or just for storage space.
The Xbox Series S only has 500GB of space, minus what the OS takes up, leaving it with less than 500GB. While the Xbox Series X will have less than 1TB, but still considerably more space. Now, for those who are thinking you’ll just use the older external drives, I got bad news for you… you can’t.
While you can take an external drive from your existing Xbox One and use it to transfer your games to your Xbox Series X and S, that’s all you can do. You will not be able to play games optimized for the Xbox Series X or S from them. What you can do is store your games on them, but then you’d have to transfer them off to play them and that sounds like a hassle. So basically a pack mule, though you have to factor in that transferring games back and forth could also be slow.
The only thing I can hope for as that the pricing will drop over time, unlike the Sony PS Vita memory cards that never dropped in price. Even after the PS Vita was declared dead, you still couldn’t find them for cheap. All we can do is cross our fingers, but until then (and if) we’ll have to bite the bullet and drop the $220 on this expandable storage.
