New Xbox Update Adds Support for Larger External Drives

A new system update is available for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One consoles today, and it adds support for larger external drives. Users can now connect external drives of any size to their consoles, though any drive larger than 16 TB will be separated into multiple partitions.

Xbox consoles can only store games on USB 3.0/3.1 external drives with a minimum of 128GB of storage, and it’s possible to connect up to 3 external USB drives on the same console. In practice, drives larger than 16 TB will be automatically separated into multiple partitions with a maximum size of 16 TB per partition. “With this change to storage capacity on the console, you can leave all your games installed on the same device,” the company said in the release notes for the update.

While external USB drives can be used to store both Xbox One games and current-gen Xbox Series X|S games, the latter will need to be transferred to the internal NVMe SSD or an officially licensed storage expansion card to launch. These storage expansion cards are still more expensive than regular SSD storage, though Seagate’s 2TB card is currently discounted to $219.99 on Amazon.

You can download today’s update on your console by going to Profile & system > Settings > System > Updates.