Xbox Series X / S expansion cards are near their lowest prices for Prime Day

1 week ago

There’s a deluge of games coming to Xbox over the next few months, so you’d better have some extra storage handy. Xbox Series X / S owners only have one real option for newer games: the various expansion cards you can get from Western Digital and Seagate. Thankfully, they’re steeply discounted for the October Amazon Prime Day event.

Exclusively for Prime members, Western Digital’s WD_Black C50 1TB Storage Expansion Card for Xbox is on sale at Amazon for $120.64 (about $37 off), very nearly its lowest price to date. You can also get WD’s 512GB card for $65.54 (about $14 off), a few dollars shy of its lowest mark.

Western Digital’s storage expansion cards for Xbox Series X / S consoles are speedy, plug-and-play cards that match the performance of the consoles’ onboard SSDs. They offer a slightly lower-cost alternative to Seagate’s expansion cards, which were the only game in town for years.

Seagate expansion cards are on sale, too. They’re a bit more expensive, but they also don’t require a Prime membership. Amazon has discounted the 1TB Seagate Storage Expansion Card to $129.99 ($30 off), which is just $4 more than its all-time low. You can double up with a 2TB card for $199.99 ($50 off) at Amazon, which is the lowest price yet.

Proprietary SSD expansion for the Xbox Series X / S consoles. The plug-and-play drives are designed to be as fast as the Xbox internal SSD and are sold in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB configurations.

These cards sacrifice virtually no performance compared to the consoles’ internal memory. Other USB-based external storage options on modern Xbox consoles are limited to playing backward compatible games or just temporarily offloading current games to save space on the built-in drive. But the NVMe-based expansion cards can run games and even support the Xbox’s Quick Resume function, allowing you to keep multiple titles running at the same time for fast back-and-forth switching.

With modern games consuming so much space, the built-in 1TB of storage on the Series X — or 512GB, in the case of the base Series S — fills up quickly. PlayStation 5 owners may be able to install a variety of much cheaper M.2 SSDs, but Microsoft chose the more straightforward plug-and-play method with its proprietary expansion cards, at a price.