The Xbox Series S is a great console, but if you bought a Game Pass machine to keep costs down you’ll quickly find yourself running out of storage space. The same goes for the Xbox Series X, as even Microsoft‘s flagship machine can only hold a fraction of the gargantuan Game Pass library. For that reason, an official expansion card comes in handy.
With every big online savings event, I find myself recommending this deal – in fairness, it’s a dang good one and something I still think more Xbox gamers need to know about. The WD Black C50 1TB expansion card is back down to its lowest-ever price at Amazon, down from $149.99 to just $124.99. I’ve been watching its price like a hawk over the last year, and so far that price has been reserved for Black Friday and Prime Day – the biggest sales events on the calendar.
That gets you an extra terabyte of extra space, and you won’t even notice the difference from your console’s internal drive, since you’ll still be able to Quick Resume your games as normal. Perhaps most importantly, this gets you an official 1TB expansion for less than the Seagate one, which people still look to as the only Xbox Series X hard drive worth buying. In fairness, that tiny SSD for gaming is on offer at the minute as well, but at $139.99.
Should you buy the WD Black C50?
If you need 1TB of extra space in your Xbox, it doesn’t get better than the WD Black C50. Seagate does have the upper hand if you want 2TB, since the C50 only comes in 500GB and 1TB shapes. Nonetheless, it’s cheaper in the 1TB race and performs just as well.
If you don’t opt for an official expansion card, your next best option is to grab one of the best external hard drives for gaming. Portable SSDs have some rather ludicrous speeds these days, but even if you grab one of those on the cheap, you won’t be able to launch Series X/S games from it. Sure, moving games across to your internal hard drive will be much easier than deleting and reshuffling to make space, but an Expansion Card takes out that middleman entirely.
By far, my favorite thing about the Series X is the Quick Resume feature. With so many games at my fingertips, I love being able to swap between them in a heartbeat. This is truly one of the features I think the current generation of Xbox consoles can hold over PlayStation owners – even if the best SSDs for PS5 are technically faster than the storage options I’m discussing here. So far though, the C50 and Seagate Expansion Card are the only two Xbox options that are fast enough to use the Quick Resume feature, so they’re the first ones you should consider.
Check out some last-generation storage options too – they might be a bit cheaper. The best Xbox One external hard drives and the best PS4 external hard drives are always viable, as are the best PS4 SSDs.