Gamers will no longer be limited to the Seagate Expansion Card when adding additional space to their Xbox Series X or S consoles. These cards have been quite effective in getting the job done but they have been quite expensive compared to other NVMe solutions in the market. Now, WD (Western Digital) has a solution.
The price of NVMe has been falling everywhere, finally making it a more attractive solution for replacing common drives (not just your OS drive). 1TB NVMe drives have been seeing prices as low as $55 in some sales with an average hovering now around $60-$90 for big-name brands.
WD is apparently working to launch its own solution for the Xbox Series X/S consoles, starting with the WD_Black C50 1TB Expansion Card. First noticed by users via Best Buy’s website, it looks like its MSRP will be $179.99, cutting below Seagate’s $219.99 MSRP (although Seagate’s 1TB model has fallen to $189 since).
At the moment, it shows as “sold out”, which is Best Buy’s placeholder for “we don’t have any of these just yet”. But it shows that consumers can likely expect to see them soon–and it’s about time. The idea of offering expanded storage with the Xbox Series X/S consoles has been open to multiple manufacturers, but only Seagate stepped in with nothing but silence from the others. Making some wonder if the two companies had an exclusivity agreement clause for a specific window of time that they were keeping quiet about.
Although the price is far from perfect, it is still better than Seagate’s MSRP and it will help to finally create some competition that could help those prices come down even further. This may also not be the final MSRP of the drive since WD hasn’t come out with any announcements just yet.
2 Comments
About damn time someone else stepped up to the plate for this
That’s about time