When Xbox Expansion Cards were first introduced back in 2020, the idea behind them was to match the internal speeds of the Xbox Series X and S's SSD drives, allowing you to store and play games directly via these cards in the process.
However, did you know there's a way to make an Xbox Expansion Card function as a PC SSD? We didn't! Fortunately, one Xbox fan took to Reddit this week to share how they managed to make their PC recognise the card.
In a nutshell, they bought a specific type of PCIE card reader for their PC — a "Sintech Low Profile PCI-e 4X CFexpress Memory Card Reader, Compatible with Sony ProGrade Lexar Type B Card", which has since sold out on Amazon where they bought it from — connected it to their PC, and then inserted the Xbox Expansion Card which was seemingly recognised immediately (hence the "voila, 920GB of extra storage" mention!).
Here's a bit more about it:
"I bought this PCIE CFExpress Type B card reader, slotted it in, plugged in the expansion card... and voila. 920GB of extra storage. I've seen other people mention using an external CFexpress reader and needing to modify/remove the plastic handle from the card in order for it to fit, but this fit with no modification. I've included the read write speeds, which are not anywhere near their theoretical max speeds probably due to limitations of the PCIE card using Gen3. But it's about twice as fast as a SATA SSD — good enough for storing games/files/etc.
Edit: looks like the standard PCIE version of this is no longer available, but there are others available from other sellers. I can't speak to whether those work or not, but I assume they will."
In follow-up comments, they mention that doing this isn't a "common use case" and the speeds aren't outstanding on PC, but they're "better than my SATA SSDs" and it's a "good way to make use of drives that would otherwise just take up space" — apparently, they haven't needed to use their Xbox Expansion Card on their console much.
Of course, as mentioned in the quote above, they've only tested this with one specific type of card reader for their PC, and other models may present different results (or may not work at all). Still, if you fancy trying to repurpose your Xbox Expansion Card at any point in the future, it's worth noting that you might be able to make it work on PC.
A very cool discovery, and one that hopefully bodes well for Xbox Expansion Card support on Project Helix!