Rumour: Could The Xbox Series X 1TB Expansion Card Be Upwards Of $200?!

Expensive, but I think it might be correct. 1TB of NVMe is $130-$170USD depending on brand and speed. This, being modular, faster than the usual speeds, custom-made, I can see that 100%.
Although I'd be surprised if that price was still around come next holiday.

Yeah if true, it'd be wise for MS to keep that under their hat until after launch.

You can't have "Xbox forces you to pay 200 to add more storage" floating around when people are deciding what system to buy.

Expensive memory helped murder the Vita.

Whoa... I thought this might be the case...
(Conversion rate = £170.00 for 1TB)
You would need one of these from launch, especially with the Series S packing only 512SSD. So suddenly the cost of entry to next gen is well over £400 as realistically you could only download a few titles at most to the Series S hard drive...
I hope it's not true...

I hope it won't cost that much. That would almost be XSX's "Vita moment" and it doesn't need one of those. Of course, as the article notes you wouldn't "need" this device to store your games. Maybe MS can head off any possible bad press if this price is real because giving gamers bait is a bad idea when your last gen console didn't do as well as the competition.

As @PcTV says, the normal drive price is a little under this, then factor in Xbox branding (remember the terrible 360/One external pocket hdds? Terrible 5400rpm 2.5" drive) and more importantly, proprietary tech, I'd say this is accurate.

Edit: As an extra aside, even though the PS5 uses standardised M.2 NVME drives, the spec on them is very high end so you're talking even more expensive than these Xbox drives despite no playstation branding or proprietary tech. PC drives now exceed the PS5 and you're talking around €500 for 2tb

Wouldn't be a shock if it's true. New tech is always very expensive at first until component prices drop.
I think on Series X, you should be fine with 1TB as standard. Can shift some games to an external and swap them round if needed.
I'd be more worried about Series S owners. That drive will fill up very fast...

Out of interest how much space does everyone use on current Xbox one?
I currently use 3tb of my external 5tb drive and 500gb of my 1tb internal drive memory so 3.5tb in total. With that in mind seeing prices like this posted for just 1tb is quite alarming...

@blinx01 New tech is questionable in this case. It's the proprierary side of it that is driving up the price, 2400mbps PCIE 4.0 drives are not that new.

@BANJO I have about 384gb free on my Xbox One X. But I could easily increase it to about 700gb or more. I keep pretty much anything I COULD be interested installed (it's only BC games and Halo 5). And I only keep so much installed because I'm trying to justify not having only Halo 5 installed.

Yeah I was expecting around this price with SSD prices. Hopefully they will come down with the increased demand from the Xbox and PS5.

My current plan is to storage swap until they are a bit more reasonably priced. I was considering picking up both consoles this year and hadn’t budgeted for an extra £300-400 on storage. Also don’t want to repeat my switch SD card purchases starting with a 128GB then jumping to 256 then 512 and now eyeing a 1TB but it’s so bloody expensive....

@FraserG That sounds like the best option, storage swapping the games between a large HDD and the 1TB SSD.
While not ideal it seems to be a good way forward..
It might also improve my poor gaming habits of trying to play 4/5 games at once and help me to concentrate on just a couple...

@PcTV @Menchi These fast SSDs aren't cheap and Series X uses compact cards with cooling technology. I hope that people realise that they are optional as they can store current and next-generation games on the same HDD that they already own and just move them to the internal SSD to play them. The PC equivalents of what PS5 uses aren't cheap either and it comes with 825 GB of storage only. I'll move whatever I want to play to the internal SSD.

@BANJO I use a 4 TB external HDD and I will connect that to the Series X. "Free" storage for Series X.

Although I kinda understsnd not wanting to be uninstalling stuff, all more storage will do is delay the inevitable. Sooner or later people fill it up and have to decide what needs to go.

Although I guess there can be a concern for people that honestly just play multiple games as a service all the time, since the likes of that CoD Battle Royale can take a ton of space.

This might be one place where smart delivery might kinda backfire [in a minor way]. X1 games can be played off external HDs, but don't think you have the option of running the prev-gen version of a smart delivery game. I could see myself keeping something like Fortnite, Apex and Warzone on the X1 versions so they would not hug the SSD if it was an option.

@BlueOcean That's where the additional 512 SSD internal memory on Series X really shines over the Series S..
I suppose you may not even need to buy a 1TB SSD for a while that way or technically ever if you were happy to just swap the games across...

Edit - This really makes me hope the additional feature coming to Game Pass is the ability to stream the games...

@BANJO Part of our obsession with having all games installed is because we didn't trust digital in the beginning and because we forget the games that we own if they aren't there.

The current Xbox One UI shows all the games clearly, even those that are not installed, even those available on Game Pass that you have never downloaded. All those available games appear on different sections: My games, Gold, Game Pass... Those that aren't installed have the arrow symbol, you can select them and download them. Xbox One UI has improved so much during this generation that I think it's going to be a piece of cake to play whatever games we want to play on Xbox Series, even if they are not installed on the internal SSD. Microsoft has the best UI for managing games, much better than PS4 and Switch that I also own.

EDIT:

Streaming games would be a nice addition and they will probably add it.

@BlueOcean Very true, every Xbox One game I have purchased I currently have installed either on the internal or external HDD...
Even with Game Pass games I struggle to delete them if there is a chance I will play them again...
I'm quite a late switcher to digital games compared to many, having only relatively recently got a Xbox One so I like to keep everything installed.
However, as you say, improvements in UI bringing the benefit of being able to clearly/quickly see all games installed or not should help combat the desire to have everything you own installed on the hard drive..
The ability to stream would basically negate this entirely...

@abe_hikura My first thought upon reading the headline was the Vita. Proprietary storage at that price? It would be an immediate deal-breaker for a lot of people. And let's not forget that 1TB frankly isn't that much in today's modern console world to begin with.

That's an insane price, but it's def going to be needed. As 1TB doesn't store a lot of games. I have nearly an 8TB external full of games and an additional 10TB one to add when the time comes. It's annoying you're going to have to constantly be moving games about. Should bundle one of these with the new black ops game.

I have an external hard drive for my Xbox right now and I’m not close to filling it up yet.

However, as a former Vita owner, Sony’s idiotic way of handling the memory on that handheld was beyond annoying. Who ships a handheld console with no internal memory & then charge ridiculous prices for memory cards?!!

Microsoft needs to be careful here. Swapping games to an external drive wouldn’t be ideal, but it would be fine with me for single player games that I finish or games that I am not interested in the multiplayer for. But paying crazy prices for these portable SSD drives is going to turn people off, obviously.

That said, Sony has the same issue with the PS5. It’ll be interesting to see how both companies handle this.

i would be very surprised if this is an accurate price. for one thing, it would encourage other companies to come up with larger external options for less money, immediately undercutting MS. Secondly, everyone seems to be forgetting that because it's proprietary tech that MS is buying in bulk, they should be able to sell them for a lot less. for $219, i would find one on Black Friday/Cyber Monday for less

Meh...the 100% always correct (never wrong, mind you) Pachter predicted XSX would be priced at $400, then "retail sources" had the XSX at $600. Just wait and see.

https://www.tomsguide.com/features/xbox-series-x-can-afford-to-undercut-ps5-heres-why

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/xbox-series-x-price-just-leaked-and-its-shockingly-high

@armondo36
The only issue with that is the method of connecting the proprietary storage is 100% owned by Microsoft. Anyone making a knock off that fit with the XSX|S would be infringing on Microsoft's I.P.

Think of it as the PS Vita. The memory was a simple SD card. Cheap and easy to substitute...but Sony used a proprietaray design that prevented other SD cards from working while also preventing anyone else from making a SD card that would work with the Vita.

@lacerz Microsoft has been on a customer-friendly kick for a while now, i think sooner or later they allow third-party storage solutions, especially if the memory cards (because i love the idea of memory cards lol) are 200 bucks somehow...