The best Xbox Series X SSD just got a price cut

Xbox Series X has many benefits. Its proprietary storage solution isn’t one of them. Seagate’s expansion card, which goes in the Xbox Series X console at the back has been exorbitantly priced since its launch alongside Xbox Series X 2020. Even as the cost of fast M.2 SSDs used in PlayStation 5s sank, Xbox expansion cards clung to higher prices, likely in part because they’re the only option.

Microsoft has announced that the price of its 1TB model will drop to $149.99 from $219.99. announcedTwitter announced the permanent price reduction. There are two other sizes, 512 GB and 2 TB, but 512 GB is rarely in stock, and too small — seriously, Star Wars Jedi Survivor is 135.18 GB — while the higher 2 TB capacity may still be out of reach at $279.99; that’s more than half the cost of a Series X.

Because the Seagate expansion cards can be used to store and play Xbox Series X games from (slower USB drives are limited to games from the Xbox One generation and earlier), it’s technically the best Xbox SSD that exists. So, as much as it would personally pain me to pay this much for storage if I owned an Xbox, it’s the SSD that you should buy if you want more space for games and their increasingly huge updates. If you want more information, please refer to the following table.

If you’re able to hold off adding more storage for later, I suggest waiting for news on a newcomer that might shake up the pricing structure a bit. According to The Verge, a Western Digital expansion card called C50 was spotted at Best Buy in April. We have no confirmation that it will be officially supported, or whether it’ll launch at the purported $179.99 cost for 1 TB (now more expensive than the equivalent Seagate model), but more competition could mean even lower prices in the future.