Xbox is launching a new beta software update to increase its external storage limit. Microsoft’s gaming platform has starting rolling out the test for Insiders as part of the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring which will allow the Series X and S to support larger external hard drives.
Although previously support was only available for up to 16TB of space on a single USB-connected drive, the new updated will allow consoles to partition larger hard disks into segments to benefit from the full physical storage space.
In a post on the Xbox Support site, the team said: “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.”
However, any “drives greater than 16TB that have already been formatted will be unaffected by this change”, which means they will need to be reformatted make use of the “updated support for larger drives”.
Current generation games still can’t be played directly from an external drive, but the change will give gamers more space to store older games without needing to redownload them for subsequent replays.
