The holiday season brought people new Xbox consoles, new games, and maybe even some new Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. If you got all that, but didn't get some extra storage, you may want to use some of your holiday gift cards on these deals for WD_Black C50 expansion cards, now just $190 for the 2 TB edition on Amazon.
The Xbox Series X|S consoles are horribly light on internal storage, and plagued by the need for proprietary SSDs. Any chance to pick up extra storage at a discount deserves a second look, and Amazon is certainly delivering with some sweet discounts on both WD_Black C50 expansion cards and the original Seagate storage expansion cards alike. The C50 certainly pulls ahead in overall price, with all three cards currently at a discount. Seagate's 2 TB expansion card is also discount, but even with offering 44% off, it is still not quite as cheap as a 2 TB WD_Black C50 at just $190.
While the Seagate expansion cards were the original option thanks to a marketing agreement with Xbox, WD_Black didn't hold back when the C50 expansions hit the market.
"Specs-wise, the WD_BLACK C50 Expansion Card is every bit a match for the Seagate Expansion Card. Both cards fully support the Xbox Velocity Architecture to achieve maximum performance in all Xbox Series X|S Optimized titles. You also get full Quick Resume support, so you can quickly jump back into any games you've played recently. In these respects, both expansion cards are functionally identical to the Xbox Series X|S internal SSD. The only difference is how portable these cards can be, easily installed and uninstalled via the Xbox Expansion Slot, so you can take your games with you if need be," Windows Central's own Zachary Boddy said in a review of the WD_Black C50 Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S.
A recent outage has taken out Xbox Cloud Gaming and Remote Play services, and titles like Call of Duty are gobbling up more and more of our storage drives with every update. The only way to really combat that storage creep is with a drive large enough to keep your favorite games at the ready. You could, of course, use an external hard drive of any sort with your Xbox Series X|S. But doing so will limit what you can install and the console features that you can benefit from.
WD_Black and Seagate expansion cards licensed for the Xbox Series X|S are the only way to ensure you're getting the most of your console and can take advantage of features like the Quick Resume. Xbox Series X|S titles also can only be played from these proprietary drives. So while an external hard drive can be handy to keep your backward compatible titles on, you're going to need the big guns if you want to play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or some of Xbox's upcoming games for 2025 like Avowed.
