If you’ve got tons of games installed on your Xbox, you might be worried about running out of space. While Xbox Series X|S consoles support up to 16GB external hard drives (which is more than enough to store hundreds of games), they haven’t been compatible with anything larger. That’s about to change, with a recent update for the Xbox Insider Program bringing support for external hard drives larger than 16GB.
Any drives larger than 16GB that you format with your Xbox Series X|S will then appear as multiple drives, giving you access to all of the available space.
While this update is only for the Alpha Skip-Ahead Ring users for now, it should hopefully be making its way to regular Xbox console users before long. Here’s the full list of changes and fixes included in this Alpha ring update:
- Expand Your Xbox Storage with Support for Larger Drives
- We are enabling support for external USB drives larger than 16TB, so you can be sure your favorite games are always ready to play! Newly formatted drives that are larger than 16TB will be formatted with multiple partitions to utilize all available space for games and apps. These will appear as multiple devices in the storage devices list.
- Spot Great Deals from the Comfort of Home
- Today’s update makes finding discounts easier than ever. A random subset of users will see a new badge we’re adding to games on sale that you don’t already have access to, showing the percentage off directly on your Home screen.
- Accessibility
- Fixes to improve Narrator readout in Settings, particularly in power options and when enabling remote play.
- Entertainment Apps
- Fixed an issue where some media apps could become laggy or sluggish after extended playback.
- System
- Various updates to properly reflect local languages across the console
- Known issues
- System
- We are investigating reports of the console shutting down or restarting unexpectedly when testing the network connection.
- System
Never running out of storage
Xbox Series X|S consoles require new Optimized games to be installed on the console’s internal SSD or on a matching Seagate or WD_Black Expansion Drive. These drives are certified to match the internal SSD, ensuring smooth, stable gameplay and ultra-fast load speeds.
Because this limited storage is needed for new games, it’s always best to install non-Optimized titles on an external hard drive. It’s a problem compounded by the fact that many modern games are growing well beyond even 100GB in size, rapidly eating up storage space. You can also store an Xbox Series X|S Optimized game on an external hard drive, but you’ll have to move it back over to the SSD in order to actually play it.
As a result, while it’s certainly hard to use up the currently-supported 16GB of storage in one of the best Xbox hard drives, it’s still technically possible, especially for anyone that buys large amounts of backward compatible games and keeps them all installed at once.
With even larger hard drive support on the way, anyone that’s been running into this problem lately should be quite happy soon.
