Microsoft Xbox Series X|S Storage Cards

Let's hope other manufacturers come along to force competition. Definitely going to put off the purchase of one for as long as possible.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09...xbox-series-s-custom-storage-solution-primer/

Xbox Wire: Will all Storage Expansion Cards come from Seagate or could we see them from other companies as well?

Jason Ronald: Seagate, with a storied history as a critical innovator in the storage industry, was our first choice to collaborate with to provide expandable storage solutions for the Xbox Velocity Architecture. Xbox is continuing to invest in the Expandable Storage category on Xbox Series X|S with goal of offering choice for Xbox fans, including additional capacities and implementations in the future.

...

Xbox Wire: Let’s start with the size of games and how that relates to Xbox Series X|S?

Jason Ronald: A significant portion of the overall size of a game is comprised of texture data. As Xbox Series S was designed with a performance target of 1440p at 60 FPS with support for up to 120 FPS, many games will not require their highest level of 4K textures resulting in smaller game sizes overall, often up to 30% smaller on average.
People are saying it's a CFExpress card. That's a very costly format. Cameras left that shit long ago lol.
 
People are saying it's a CFExpress card. That's a very costly format. Cameras left that shit long ago lol.

Per the dimensions from the spec sheet on Seagate's site(31.6mm x 52.95mm). It looks more like the M.2 2260 format size(22mm x 60mm). Unless the plastic casing on the end doesn't house the NAND and controller, then it could be the M.2 2242(22mm x 42mm) or M.2 2230(22mm x 30mm) size.

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Tommy McClain
 
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I will also have a 3 level storage hierarchy when I move my SSD and 2.5inch HDD over. Too bad they only support USB3.1 Gen1 which was a bad move. USB-C with Thunderbolt would have been nice.

At the time AMD didn't support Thunderbolt on any products, so that was a no-go for the console. A USB 3.1 gen 2 at double the speed would have been nice when hooking up external NVME drives (SATA external SSDs are still fine on gen 1). USB 3.2 would have been good but I'm not sure that was available from AMD at the time the consoles were in development.

Regardless, hopefully other SSD manufacturer's are able, willing, and capable enough to deliver competing external drives for XB-series. It's possible that there might be a period of contracted exclusivity for Seagate due to them helping with development of the drive.

Regards,
SB
 
Those are prices for mass market standardized products, which the Series' storage cards are not.


A similar situation to this was the Vita's proprietary memory cards, which throughout the years never kept up (or down) with the price-per-GB of microSD cards of similar or faster speeds.
Here's for example the 64GB Vita memory card:
https://camelcamelcamel.com/PlayStation-Vita-Memory-Card-PCH-Z641J/product/B00F27JGVA

Vs. a standard 64GB Class 10 MicroSDXC from Sandisk:
https://camelcamelcamel.com/SanDisk-Mobile-MicroSDXC-Memory-Adapter/product/B0081EAK34

Yep. I remember the proprietary hard drives MS sold with 360. They would reduce MSRP on them every so often, but they stayed way behind generic HDD prices and remained a bad to terrible value throughout. I'm guessing a repeat happens with these SSD's. IE, maybe in 2 years they drop to $169, or something.

MS apparently wants a fat profit from it's accessories, I wish they'd make an exception.


My plan for dealing with 1TB internal reaching capacity is replacing the external 4TB HDD with a larger one and using the 2TB SSD as the warm-spare staging area for Xbox Series X optimized games. That is if I have some I may play from time to time but not weekly. The external HDD will be for cold storage.

My big conundrum is, for cold storage is it better to go with something like a huge (6TB) HDD, or a similarly priced standard (maybe SATA) 1TB SSD? The latter of course will hold far fewer games but they'll load up much faster. Really dont know which is the way to go.



I currently have attached to my One X a 1TB Hybrid and a ~500GB SSD. At least I can throw the 500GB SSD on my Series X to hold a little more (like 2 games LOL) at no cost to me. Having two external drives attached to my One X sucks, it's annoying. I've vowed to only ever have one external from now on.

I mean if you are digital only the store itself acts as cold storage....

I would have to test which is faster a HDD or the store. On my 400 mbps connection, I've found Xbox servers wont deliver any more than 200-300 mbps anyway (in my geographical location, anyway). Destiny which is now up to 108Gb takes me I think an hour and a half to DL?

There are several options, cold storage, using discs as backup media if you have the X, and the store/cloud. It will be quite interesting. I need to do some testing to find out the real transfer times of some options. Of course any current testing on my One X may be bottlenecked by the USB.

Jason Ronald: A significant portion of the overall size of a game is comprised of texture data. As Xbox Series S was designed with a performance target of 1440p at 60 FPS with support for up to 120 FPS, many games will not require their highest level of 4K textures resulting in smaller game sizes overall, often up to 30% smaller on average.

I saw that, and my main thought is good luck. I expect little of that ("up to" weasel wording) 30% will be realized in practice and/or devs will be sloppy and not support it. I could be completely wrong but yes.
 


Perhaps they're pricing similarly to the kind of PC SSD that PS5 users are going to need? 1TB Samsung 980 Pro is currently about £220 in the UK.

Not that I think that's a reasonable justification for this price. Did not expect it to be this un-cheap.

I guess MS are driving their hands thinking about those sweet peripheral sales $$$S.
 
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Yep. I remember the proprietary hard drives MS sold with 360. They would reduce MSRP on them every so often, but they stayed way behind generic HDD prices and remained a bad to terrible value throughout. I'm guessing a repeat happens with these SSD's. IE, maybe in 2 years they drop to $169, or something.

MS apparently wants a fat profit from it's accessories, I wish they'd make an exception.
Hopefully like the 360 the DRM is just a security sector that gets dumped and we can roll our own easily.

My big conundrum is, for cold storage is it better to go with something like a huge (6TB) HDD, or a similarly priced standard (maybe SATA) 1TB SSD? The latter of course will hold far fewer games but they'll load up much faster. Really dont know which is the way to go.
I plan to do both, I understand only wanting one usb HDD, I plan a large 3.5 HDD for Xbox one games (currently hooked up to my One X). This will likely be plugged in 24/7. This will house all the kids existing games.

I have snaffled an m2 SSD from a laptop that now has a housing and this will be cold storage, as it's cold I will only get it out to rotate series X games as required, I doubt it will see much work. More archive of games I have stopped playing but don't want to have to re-download.


I saw that, and my main thought is good luck. I expect little of that ("up to" weasel wording) 30% will be realized in practice and/or devs will be sloppy and not support it. I could be completely wrong but yes.

They have to support textured first. (The Falconeer, launch title)

But yes, good if thoes folks on S see this but I would not breath easy just yet.

Very interested to see some cross gen install size comparisons
 
The “article”/PR says they “sat down with” Jason. Is this just a conversational fumble? Surely someone went over this whole piece with a fine-toothed comb before posting it.

Cerny seemed very precise with his vagueness (was the hardware even finalized and in production yet?), but, yeah, the end result is the same: “reply hazy, try again later.”

Can’t begrudge them an early adaptor tax, but it’s crazy to have storage in the same ballpark as the XSS. $220 for 1TB, or $300 for .5TB and a controller and a console.
 
Can’t begrudge them an early adaptor tax, but it’s crazy to have storage in the same ballpark as the XSS. $220 for 1TB, or $300 for .5TB and a controller and a console.
I was expecting a fair investment to expand the PS5 but not breaking £200. I will wait until a good NVMe falls below this and, like BRiT, resort to a cheap external mass storage. Whether that's HDD or SDD will depend on whether there is a significant performance advantage of going the solid state route.
 
I'm not sure why anyone would be buying next-gen expansion storage explicitly for either of the consoles right now. Certainly you should be able to get by for a few months until the convenience outweighs the cost, right? At the very least, wait until November to purchase.
 
Perhaps they're pricing similarly to the kind of PC SSD that PS5 users are going to need? 1TB Samsung 980 Pro is currently about £220 in the UK.

Not that I think that's a reasonable justification for this price. Did not expect it to be this un-cheap.

I guess MS are driving their hands thinking about those sweet peripheral sales $$$S.

Proprietary storage/formats are always going to be more expensive (PSP says hi) in the long run, as they cannot benefit from economies of scale. Also remember the 980 Pro is the top of the line in the market of consumer SSDs, I expect PCIe 4.0 SSD from other manufacturers to be cheaper although probably not until 2022. If PS5 sells well, they'll also be incentivized to certify their drives to be compatible with Sony's requirements.
 
Proprietary storage/formats are always going to be more expensive (PSP says hi) in the long run, as they cannot benefit from economies of scale. Also remember the 980 Pro is the top of the line in the market of consumer SSDs, I expect PCIe 4.0 SSD from other manufacturers to be cheaper although probably not until 2022. If PS5 sells well, they'll also be incentivized to certify their drives to be compatible with Sony's requirements.

It's not really a priority format. It's using the same nand chips etc as everyone else (and the internal storage). They benefit from those economies of scale.

Do we have any idea what the typical production run on NVMe drives actually is? I suspect that for some of the smaller suppliers it's not disproportionate to what the Xbox market will be.
 
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What did people expect? Did they forget the X360 HDD add-on prices vs standard HDD?

I guessed at 200 and I don’t expect the price to fall anywhere near inline with PS5 equivalent SSDs, and of course likewise the 2nd hand market will be an even bigger gap.
 
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