Fast load times via solid-stare drives (SSDs) is one of the new console generation’s biggest benefits. An internal SSD’s speed is hard to emulate, which means its hard to expand the Xbox Series S/X’s storage and maintain the same performance. That’s where Seagate comes in, with the Storage Expansion Card for the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. It’s a 1TB SSD that plugs directly into the expansion card slot on the back of either system, immediately adding storage that’s nearly as fast as the internal SSD. At $219.99 it’s pricey, but not that much more expensive than comparable external SSDs (and even internal SSDs like the WD Black P50 come close to the card’s price). This is particularly important for titles optimized for the new Xbox consoles, as the systems don’t support installing games via USB drives, SSD or HDD, because the transfers speeds are comparatively slower.
A Small Wonder
The Storage Expansion Card is a remarkably tiny SSD. It’s barely the size of a credit card and not much thicker, measuring just 2.1 by 1.25 by 0.3 inches (HWD). A black plastic cap takes up a third of the rectangular card, holding the Xbox logo, a label noting that it’s 1TB in capacity, and a small plastic tab to make it easier to insert and remove. The rest of the card is a dark gray, metal slip bearing the Seagate logo, with an open end containing the drive’s connection pins. It’s reminiscent of the PCMCIA accessory cards that old laptops accepted. The interface uses the Xbox Velocity Architecture, which according to Microsoft, offers speeds 40 times that of conventional hard drives.
To install the card, just insert it into the expansion slot on the back of the Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S. Push the card in firmly to make sure it completely connects, and the system will automatically detect the SSD. After that, you’ll have plenty of extra space to install games or other content.
The Storage Expansion Card has 1TB of storage, which adds up to an effective 920GB of free storage on the Xbox Series S/X. The slightly lower available storage is due to how it’s counted by the system, but even 920GB is a fair bit more than the stock Xbox Series X (out of its internal 1TB SSD, only 802GB are available due to the operating system), and far more than the Xbox Series S’ comparatively tiny 512GB SSD.
Excellent Performance
Since it’s an SSD just like the Xbox Series S/X’s internal storage, and uses a special connection rather than USB, the Storage Expansion Card is very fast. Seagate and Microsoft claim the expansion card slot provides speeds equal to internal storage, but that didn’t quite translate in my tests. It took 54 seconds to copy Yakuza: Like a Dragon, a 37GB installation, from the internal SSD to the card. It then took 1 minute and 21 seconds to move the full game back to the internal SSD.
Still, the card’s swift performance translates into swift game-loading speed, though it isn’t quite as quick as the internal storage. It took 46 seconds to load Yakuza: Like a Dragon—a game installed on the Storage Expansion Card—from the Home screen into a saved game. When installed on the internal SSD, that same load took 38 seconds. That’s still very quick for the card.
More importantly, loading a save game from the main menu (compared with starting the game from the home screen) took about six seconds, regardless of where it was installed. Loading save games from a hard drive can take two, three, four, or more times as long, at least based on the experience of playing Yakuza games’ on older consoles.
To compare the Storage Expansion Card’s performance with a USB-based SSD, I connected a Patriot PXD 1TB external SSD drive to the Xbox Series X via an USB ports on the system’s rear, and formatted it to allow game installations. Transferring Yakuza: Like a Dragon to the drive took a lengthy 3 minutes and 39 seconds, more than three times longer than it took to transfer the game to the Storage Expansion Card.
More importantly, the Xbox Series X warned me that the game wouldn’t run from the Patriot drive, because it wasn’t a fast enough connection. Perhaps the connection would have been faster if I used a USB-C-to-USB-C cable instead of USB-C-to-USB-A, but the Xbox Series X lacks USB-C ports. So, at least for large Xbox Series S/X-optimized games, you must use internal storage or the Storage Expansion Card. If a game isn’t optimized for the Xbox Series S/X, like Xbox One or earlier games, you can install it on a USB drive and it’ll work fine. It’ll just load much more slowly.
Double Your SSD Storage
The Seagate Storage Expansion Card adds 1TB of storage to the Xbox Series S/X that’s about as fast, if perhaps just slightly slower, as the internal SSD. That’s excellent performance, and it helps justify its $220 price. If 1TB isn’t enough space for your Xbox Series X, this is an easy way to double that. The Xbox Series S is another story; its 512GB SSD is half the size, but adding the Storage Expansion Card adds up to more than the cost of the Xbox Series X. We recommend simply getting the X from the start instead of adding it to the S, for all of the extra features you get (like an optical drive, and a much more powerful GPU).
SSD drives connected over USB are several times slower than the Storage Expansion Card, with external hard drives slower still, and both poorly suited for installing and loading next-gen games. The Storage Expansion Card is pricey, but not much more pricey than a comparable external SSD, and stands as the best way to expand storage for your Xbox Series S/X.
