Xbox One External Storage Eventual, But Not At Launch

Xbox One external storage won’t be available at launch, but it will be eventually.

One thing the Xbox has been famous for since the beginning was its ability to use a hard drive like a PC, though it has evolved over the years. The original Xbox was able to store music and use it in games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2X for a more personalized gameplay experience. It was an option that many gamers loved, and then missed after updates eliminated it.

The Xbox 360 was the first Microsoft console to have interchangeable hard drives which allowed for much larger items to be stored to it. One of the advantages added was the ability to install entire games to the console using the Xbox Home menu. It also opened the gateway to downloading entire games through Xbox Live, even though it introduced one of the biggest annoyances in gaming, as previously reported by The Inquisitr.

Xbox One external storage won’t be possible when the console launches, and the hard drive won’t be exchangeable. On the bright side, this means you won’t need to buy a separate hard drive to save games on the Xbox One, as it’s already inside the console. The downside is that if you somehow fill it up, there is no option to swap it out for a larger one.

Microsoft director of programming Major Nelson addressed this problem:

“The Xbox One will ship with a 500GB hard drive, all of them have that. The future plan is definitely to support external storage, much like we do on the Xbox 360. My understanding is that feature will not be there at launch because the team’s working on some other things, but it’s definitely on the list, I don’t know when it’ll come in though.”

#Xbox One unlikely to support external storage at launch, but “the future plan” is to support it, says Major Nelson: http://t.co/pKsV33zgeN

— CVG (@CVG_News) September 2, 2013

We can only hope that the Xbox One external storage will be remedied quickly enough, as the games will no doubt be bigger than those on the Xbox 360, and the hard drive will get filled up a lot faster.