Upgrading the storage on the Xbox Series X|S is a little tricky. With the X|S, you need to buy specific expansion cards that plug into the expansion slot on the back of the console. They come in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB sizes.
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Playing X|S optimized games
You can play X|S optimized games off the internal SSD and the expansion cards that are sold. You can play Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Original Xbox games off any external drive. Playing those games off the internal drive does provide some performance (faster load times) increases.
Personally, in December of 22, I bought a Series S and a 2TB card because I like to play a variety of games and also at that time, our Cable Provider had a cap on monthly transfers. The cap was rather low and we would come close or go over and pay a pretty large “penalty” every month.
In December of 23, I sold my Series S and got a Series X and transferred my 2TB expansion card from the S to the X with no problem. You can buy more than 1 card and swap them out if you are not satisfied with the capacity that you have. You can also plug the cards into other consoles, it may or may not require you to sign in to your Xbox account. There is a setting when you install the Expansion card that asks if it’s going to be staying in the current Series Xbox that you installed it in, or if it’s going to plug into others.
The expansion cards are only compatible with the Xbox Series X|S, hopefully they keep that slot compatible on the next generation.
I also didn’t want to buy a USB External Hard Drive and copy from the internal SSD to the external and visa versa.
Some people have the patience for that, and there are some pretty good options for that type of storage.
Here is a great 2TB external, that maxes out the USB 3.1 speeds that the Series have to offer. This is also a great drive (for a great price) to connect to Xbox One consoles: Seagate Game Drive for Xbox 2TB External Hard Drive they also make it in a 4TB version (at an amazing price): Seagate Game Drive for Xbox 4TB External Hard Drive and finally the 8TB version (great price): Seagate Game Drive for Xbox 8TB External Hard Drive
The expansion cards don’t look as cool, but they are quite the performers. They are relatively expensive to their external brothers, but the performance is incredible.
Seagate Expansion cards come in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities (it seems the 512GB is out of stock as of the writing of this article):
Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S Cards:
Western Digital Expansion Cards, they only come in 512GB and 1TB:
