- A new leak reportedly revealed the retail price of the Xbox Series X’s SSD expansion card.
- The Seagate-manufactured expansion solution’s price could approach that of a Series S console.
- It’s more than likely we are looking at a placeholder used in anticipation of an official price.
After yesterday’s deluge of next-gen Xbox leaks and official announcements, you’d expect somewhat of a lull to allow for the dust to settle. Yet, overnight, a fresh leak surfaced, this time concerning the Seagate-manufactured Xbox Series X SSD Expansion card.
According to a screenshot snapped from what appears to be GameStop’s internal system and shared by Twitter user IdleSloth84, known for being on the ball when it comes to Xbox news, Seagate’s Xbox Series S SSD Expansion will retail at an eye-watering $219.99. That’s roughly $80 shy of the freshly-announced Xbox Series S, which will sell for a low $299.
While the expansion card boasts custom PCIe Gen4x2 NVMe flash memory, 1 TB of storage space, and is engineered to tap into the Series X’s Velocity Architecture to mimic the performance of the factory-shipped SSD found inside the console, that’s a steep price to pay, even for an SSD.
It’s a price that will conceivably turn many cold on the idea of bolstering their consoles TB count through Seagate’s solution and, instead, begrudgingly embrace the limited performance and functionality of a USB HDD/SDD, or worse, suffer the merry go round of installing and deleting games in search of precious storage space.
Naturally, we can’t discount the possibility that $219.99 is a placeholder, slapped onto the Expansion Card’s internal listing at GameStop in anticipation of an official price from Microsoft.
This seems like the most likely explanation. Indeed, Microsoft’s recent moves have proven it’s banking on an affordable and value-packed transition to the next-gen. Such a pricey expansion card would run contrary to those ambitions, even for the full-fat Xbox Series X, which the latest rumors suggest will cost $499.
