- Support for external hard drives over 16TB is coming soon to Xbox
- The feature is currently rolling out to Xbox Insider members
- It’s expected to become widely available in the coming weeks
Support for larger external hard drives is coming to Xbox, with the feature currently available as part of the latest Xbox Update Preview for Xbox Insider members.
As detailed in the Xbox Update Preview Release Notes, the company will soon be enabling support for external storage devices over the previous 16TB limit. Such drives will be formatted with multiple partitions, causing them to appear as multiple devices in the console’s storage device menu. If you’re already using a drive that’s above 16TB, just bear in mind that it will need to be reformatted in order to take advantage of the update.
Although uncommon, manufacturers like Western Digital are already selling external hard drives with 18TB and even 28TB capacities. They’re far from cheap, but this still seems like quite a wise forward-thinking change. The price of external storage reliably falls over time, so such high capacity drives are likely going to become much more affordable in the coming months and years.
External hard drives are a popular alternative to the official Xbox Storage Expansion Card format, which is considerably more expensive. They’re generally much slower and have a few key limitations, including the inability to play Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S games directly from the storage device. Xbox One, in addition to Xbox 360 and original Xbox, titles are supported, but tend to load a little slower than those on the internal drive.
The update is expected to roll out to non-Insider users in the coming weeks. If you’re looking for some recommendations for models to pick up before then, head over to our guide to the best Xbox Series X hard drives and SSDs.
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