Xbox Series X eschews storage standards for proprietary expansion “card”

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  A visualization shows how the expansion storage-card slots into the back of the Xbox Series X. [credit: Microsoft / Eurogamer ]

This morning, Microsoft dumped a massive cache of details on the Xbox Series X's internal specs and features. But the most surprising revelation buried in that info dump might be the fact that the system uses a proprietary solution for expanding its 1TB of internal game storage.

Digital Foundry's deep-dive report on the Series X, created in close conjunction with Microsoft, shows off a 1TB SSD expansion card, which the site says is "very short, quite weighty for its dimensions, and actually presents rather like a memory card." The NVMe memory on that card (which looks about half the size of a standard NVMe stick) connects through the back of the system using the same PCI Express 4.0 connection as the system's internal memory (this is the rectangular "mystery slot" seen next to the Ethernet port when images of the Series X ports leaked in January).

The Series X will still support standardized USB 3.2 hard drives, according to the Digital Foundry report, but those can only be used to natively run backward-compatible games designed for previous Xbox systems (the Xbox One, 360, and original Xbox). For Series X games, a USB hard drive can only be used as a backup solution, where you can "park" games that then need to be shuffled over to the internal storage to be played.

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