What in the world is going on?

It's pretty well established that storage prices have gone through the roof because of the chip shortage caused by hungry data centres that has sent SSD prices sky-high. What I didn't expect it to do was to make Microsoft's propreitary Xbox storage means suddenly seem quite affordable. These expandable cards have been resistant to discounts at the best of times, but at £190 from Amazon for this 2TB WD C50 model, it's the best price this has been for the best part of a year.

Adding another two terabytes of storage is a handy way of getting more space on your Xbox, especially with lots of AAA titles taking up triple figures of gigabytes on your drive. You'll feel the benefit most with a Series S and its measly 364GB of usable internal storage out of its 512GB stated capacity. You'll also be able to provide a shedload more to a Series X's storage with its 802GB of usable space on its stated 1TB internal drive. You're also doubling the internal space of the newer 2TB Series X model to give yourself a monster capacity.

This essentially stops the juggling of uninstalling and reinstalling games if you run out of space, or moving them from an external drive for 'cold' storage to the internal one to play them. This is also the maximum amount of storage you can add into an Xbox Series console internally, although consoles have the potential to support even bigger external hard drives if you're desperate for more bulk storage thanks to a reasonably recent update. Just note that if you add a bigger external hard drive or SSD, you can't play Xbox Series X|S games directly off it, but you can play any older Xbox titles directly from them.

Installing a drive like the C50 is easy, too, with Microsoft adding a specific drop-in port for these Expansion Cards on the back of the console, which you slot the drive into. It should be instantly recognised, and your Xbox should then take the extra two terabytes of capacity into account when displaying the total storage available in the bottom left corner.

You can then choose to automatically install games there - or move games between the internal storage and the Expansion Card, and it shouldn't take too long to do so. Doing it with my Seagate Expansion Card with games in the past has only taken a couple of minutes. With these drives, you also get the full benefits of speedy load times with Xbox Velocity and the powers of Quick Resume, which leaves the game in a suspended state if you enter into another app, and when you go back into the game, you can pick up right where you left off - it's the same as on the internal SSD, and works quite seamlessly.

If you want to grab some usually quite expensive Xbox storage for a bit cheaper, this deal on the WD Black C50 2TB is not to be missed.