Western Digital Xbox Series expansion cards spotted on Best Buy

Perhaps some healthy competition will finally make expanding Xbox storage affordable

The Xbox Series X and S are fantastic little pieces of kit, but there’s one big issue: expandability. Until now, there’s been just one way to expand your storage for Series X|S games, and that’s been with the expensive and proprietary Seagate expansion cards. Now, there’s finally going to be competition.

A now-removed listing from Best Buy has shown that Western Digital, one of the biggest players in the PC storage space alongside Seagate, will be launching its own expansion cards. As reported by The Verge, the Western Digital C50 1TB card is about $40 less than Seagate’s own card, a small saving, but a saving nonetheless.

Seagate’s cards were released alongside the Xbox Series consoles back in 2020, but even at the time they were considered expensive for what you were getting. A 1TB card would set you back $220 in the US, and regional pricing in other countries was even more egregious.

The new expansion cards will work on both Series X and Series S consoles

The Xbox Series X is nominally a 1TB console, but only offers about 800GB worth of usable storage space to the end user. The problem is even more egregious on the Xbox Series S, which comes with just 360GB of usable storage — enough for about three installs of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

Sony seems to have the upper hand here, instead opting for a standard M.2 SSD slot, allowing users to pick just about any modern SSD off the shelf and plug it in with little to no hassle. Prices on M.2 SSDs have plummeted in recent years, and you can regularly pick up a 1TB SSD for your PS5 for less than $80 or so.

The Nintendo Switch also went with an off-the-shelf expansion option, with its use of Micro SD cards for storage space. These haven’t come down quite as quickly as M.2 SSDs, but given most Switch games are smaller than Xbox and PlayStation games, and physical Switch games don’t need to be installed, larger storage sizes aren’t quite as necessary.

While we don’t know exactly when Western Digital’s Xbox expansion cards will be released, the fact that they’re popping up on retailers suggests an official announcement isn’t far off. Hopefully other manufacturers also get on board too, and start competing to drive down the price.