Friday, January 24th 2025
Xbox Consoles Set to Support 16+ TB External Storage Devices
The Xbox Insider program has outlined a major upcoming feature upgrade for their home console lineup—Tuesday's Alpha Skip-Ahead Ring (2502.250120-2200) release notes reveal newly implemented support for larger capacity external hard drives. Naturally, inside program members get to play around with this early build—we presume that support will eventually trickle down to public level in the near future. The major announcement stated: "we are enabling support for external USB drives larger than 16 TB, so you can be sure your favorite games are always ready to play! Newly formatted drives that are larger than 16 TB will be formatted with multiple partitions to utilize all available space for games and apps. These will appear as multiple devices in the storage devices list."
Xbox-licensed external storage devices are only available with a maximum capacity of 12 TB—Western Digital's WD_BLACK D10 model wears the crown here. Console gaming enthusiasts—with a penchant for storing a huge library of titles on hard disk drives (HDD)—are best served by not selecting official Xbox-branded storage devices. Manufacturers do offer products with 18 TB to 28 TB capacities, but potential buyers will be greeted by hefty asking prices. There are a couple of caveats—for owners of 16+ TB drives—as noted in the Alpha Skip-Ahead Ring notes: "drives greater than 16 TB that have already been formatted will be unaffected by this change and would need to be reformatted to take advantage of the updated support for larger drives. Please be aware that we have identified an issue with formatting drives larger than 16 TB, and we're working on a fix." Interestingly, the notes do not disclose information regarding a new upper limit for compatible storage devices.
Sources:
Xbox Support, Eurogamer, TechRadar
Xbox-licensed external storage devices are only available with a maximum capacity of 12 TB—Western Digital's WD_BLACK D10 model wears the crown here. Console gaming enthusiasts—with a penchant for storing a huge library of titles on hard disk drives (HDD)—are best served by not selecting official Xbox-branded storage devices. Manufacturers do offer products with 18 TB to 28 TB capacities, but potential buyers will be greeted by hefty asking prices. There are a couple of caveats—for owners of 16+ TB drives—as noted in the Alpha Skip-Ahead Ring notes: "drives greater than 16 TB that have already been formatted will be unaffected by this change and would need to be reformatted to take advantage of the updated support for larger drives. Please be aware that we have identified an issue with formatting drives larger than 16 TB, and we're working on a fix." Interestingly, the notes do not disclose information regarding a new upper limit for compatible storage devices.
16 Comments on Xbox Consoles Set to Support 16+ TB External Storage Devices
I really keep hoping at this point they would release either more options and at a better price. Or at some point a cable so we can use a normal External that can be formatted to support Xbox.
Either because game recordings that I'd not delete or because I don't want to re-download games.
When I started playing the 360 a bit I really overshot HDD space by picking up a 240GB internal unit.
I still want to shuck my 60GB SSD in its place as that would have been way more my size(+speed).
Not sure what would be appropriate for Series S but one thing for certain, games have gotten HUGE.
If I were to record 1080p30 gameplay on one of these it would have to be through a capture card.
How and why would anyone be recording gameplay directly through the Xbox? That sounds so foreign.
Though not even nearly comparable, I have a 4TB PS4 licensed external HDD with my PS4 and works just as fine as its internal drive.