In his latest podcast, Larry Hryb aka Major Nelson spoke with Xbox Series director of program management Jason Ronald about the storage of the upcoming Xbox Series S and X consoles.
Storage is always a big question, and it's no different this time with a new generation of upcoming Xbox consoles.
The custom-made NVMe in Xbox Series X is really gigantic upgrade in terms of speed over the current (soon to be last) gen, but speed is not everything, as some other cool features are coming with the arrival of new consoles too.
EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES
One of them is the ability to use your existing USB 3.1 external Hard drive, that you were using as extended storage for Xbox One X, and get instant access to your installed games on Xbox Series X and S, with no format of external HDD required. Just plug it in and you're good to go. You can run them directly from your external hard drive. That's magic, right there.
You just won't see all the improvement in load times, as you would with games running from internal custom NVMe SSD. But it's extended storage, nevertheless. You'll still get all the enhancements, like higher frame-rates, texture filtering, etc.
You can opt in to purchase a storage expansion card from Seagate , of course, and transfer all your games on it, for the super-fast loading times.
Microsoft
EXPANSION CARDS AND QUICK-RESUME
Also, while on the expansion card subject, Larry asked why did engineers decide to go for a custom expansion card, instead of just letting gamers swap whatever NVMe they can find, and the answer is this: compatibility, and ease of use. You just go and buy the expansion card from Seagate, plug it in, and you know it's going to work, and there's no need to format or anything. It's designed to fully match the internal storage.
Jason also said in the podcast that the Quick-resume feature, that enables you to switch between a couple of games that are running in the background (something like apps on your iPhone, or Android device), is always run from the internal NVMe.
NEW FEATURE
A new interesting feature was mentioned in the podcast, and that is the ability to choose what component of the game you want to uninstall to free up storage.
If you have finished the singleplayer campaign, but still want to keep the game installed to play multiplayer every once in a while, you can delete the campaign component of the game, and just leave the multiplayer part installed on the storage. How neat is that?
That is if the developer decides to implement that feature in the title. So, the possibility is there, and it's up to them to take the advantage of it.
We hope that this feature becomes common in the future, so we can be more in charge of how we use our storage, as we see that games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare can take a large chunk of our precious stora
