A closer look at the Xbox Series X removable storage system

Microsoft has pretty much let all the beans out of the bag when it comes to its forthcoming Xbox Series X, high-end gaming console. Not only has it already revealed its design, but it has now also unveiled the full system specs revealing a system that is on par with some of the more powerful PC gaming rigs currently on the market. Not only that, its system architecture, dubbed ‘Velocity Architecture’, is both designed with high bandwidth and flexibility in mind.

In addition to supporting the new PCIe 4.0 standard (which supports throughput of up to 64 GB/s at 16 GHz) to leverage its built-in 1 TB NVMe SSD, the Xbox Series X also supports all-new external storage expansion cards. In the first instance, these will be provided exclusively by Seagate in capacities of up to 1 TB. As with the internal drive, these will also be NVMe SSD types supporting super-charged transfer speeds. Microsoft is boasting of load times that are a 40 second improvement over the Xbox One X with the ability to resume at least three games instantaneously from standby using RAM caching.

For those of you wondering about your existing games for the current Xbox range or earlier, you still use USB 3.1 external HDDs with the new console to play titles right back to the OG Xbox. However, to take advantage of the new Velocity Architecture, these would need to be transferred to the new internal SSD or one of Seagate’s new expansion cards. Whichever way you look at it, the next generation console wars are going to be as hard fought as ever, which is great news for gamers.