In a welcome replace for Xbox homeowners, Microsoft has introduced that its consoles will quickly assist exterior USB drives which can be bigger than 16TB in measurement. This function is now out there for members of the Xbox Insiders program to test–specifically, members who’ve unlocked the Alpha Skip-Forward tier–and is anticipated to roll out to most people within the weeks to return.
“We’re enabling assist for exterior USB drives bigger than 16TB, so that you could be positive your favourite video games are all the time able to play,” Microsoft defined in a blog post. “Newly formatted drives which can be bigger than 16TB shall be formatted with a number of partitions to make the most of all out there area for video games and apps. These will seem as a number of units within the storage units checklist.”
Anybody who already has an exterior laborious drive bigger than 16TB that has been formatted shall be unaffected by this modification, Microsoft added, noting that these storage units will should be reformatted to reap the benefits of the up to date assist. It is value noting that video games optimized for Xbox Sequence X|S consoles can’t be performed from an exterior USB drive, however these can be utilized to retailer the sport knowledge after which moved onto the console’s SSD or an NvME SSD growth card.
A brand new exterior drive-limit wasn’t talked about within the weblog put up, so in case you really feel like going all out, it does seem to be you may make use of one thing like a Seagate 24TB external hard drive to maintain backups of all of your video games.
With recreation set up sizes steadily growing over time, that is welcome information to anybody trying to preserve an enormous library of video games that may be accessed at any time. Whereas 16TB is greater than sufficient for a lot of indie and last-gen games–newer video games like Indiana Jones and the Nice Circle, Name of Responsibility: Black Ops 6, and Stalker 2: Shadow of Chornobyl can take up plenty of area.
In different Xbox information, the primary Developer Direct livestream of 2025 kicks off on January 23. South of Midnight and Doom: The Darkish Ages are among the video games that shall be featured, and Xbox can also be teasing a thriller recreation for the present. Sport Move subscribers may try all the brand new video games coming to and leaving the service this month.