With the second lot of Prime Day deals on its way next week and the Black Friday deals on the horizon, I’m keeping my eyes peeled for one discount in particular: an Xbox Series X SSD deal.
I’m lucky enough to have the Xbox Series X and a PS5 in my gaming setup. But while the latter can have its 825GB of onboard storage space augmented by an off-the-shelf PCIe 4.0 SSD, Microsoft’s boxy games console needs one of two proprietary SSD expansion cards to best build upon its 1TB of storage (you can use ordinary USB-connected hard drives but you won't be able to run games as fast or load them as fast compared to the official options).
These come courtesy of Western Digital and Seagate, but neither are cheap if you want a 1TB drive. And you’ll want that capacity, as games continue to bloom in size with recent big hitters Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 gobbling up more than 100GB of SSD space.
When the Xbox Series X arrived in November 2020 it was quickly filled by the aforementioned Seagate Xbox Storage Expansion Card. But as this card uses high-speed SSD architecture and is custom-built for the Series consoles, it cost a hefty $219 / £219 – that was nearly the price of the Series X and almost the whole price of an Xbox Series S.
Thankfully, the 1TB card has come down in price and the arrival of the WD_Black C50 means you can get an extra terabyte of solid-state storage for around $150 / £150.
However, the 1TB storage upgrade for my PS5 cost me under $100 / £100, so I’m holding out for a deal that sees the Xbox Series X expansion have their prices sliced to around that mark.
We're seeing some discounts right now, which you can check out below if you're interested in striking before the sales events.
Xbox SSD deals you can get right now
Going by previous Amazon sales days and Black Friday deals, Amazon itself will be my first port of call for a discount SSD. But I’ll also be keeping a weather eye on the Microsoft Store and UK retailers like Currys and Very.
I’m not based in the US, but American bargain hunters would be best served checking out the likes of Best Buy and Newegg alongside Amazon. B&H Photo is also worth a look, alongside Walmart.
My hope is I’ll be able to find the newer 2TB Seagate Storage Expansion Card for an attractive price, as that would set me up with plenty of space to fill with current and upcoming Xbox Game Pass titles. But failing that, the 1TB card at a good price will put a smile on this aging gamer's face; it’ll also save me the less-than-fun game of deciding what title I’ll need to uninstall before I can download a new game – that gets tedious quickly.
For more on your storage options on console, check out the best Xbox Series X hard drives and SSDs, and the best SSDs for PS5 that we would recommend.
