Xbox consoles will soon support external drives over 16TB

By Patrick Hearn Published January 22, 2025

Your Xbox console will soon be able to support external drives greater than 16TB, according to a recent Microsoft blog post. Members of the Xbox Update Preview will get access to the latest firmware that allows for truly massive external drives to be connected to your console. Previously, 16GB was the cap, but this latest version renders that a limitation off the past. The update will be tested first by those in the preview program and then it will be released to the public.

The Xbox Series S|X hasn’t had the easiest journey in terms of storage. When the console first released, it was compatible only with officially-licensed internal drives, but no external games. Given the size of most games these days, 1TB of storage is enough for three or four games, if you’re lucky. Titles like can reach nearly 140GB on their own.

Drives greater than 16TB in size will be formatted into multiple partitions for storing all games and apps and will appear as multiple devices in the storage list. This opens up a lot of potential for organizing how your files are stored; for example, you could group games based on genre or franchise.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft doesn’t mention what the new storage cap is. It’s possible there isn’t one, in which case connecting your Xbox console to your home NAS (network-attached storage) could be possible. If that’s the case, then your Xbox could turn into the media/gaming center Microsoft envisioned back in the Xbox 360 days.

If you have a huge drive just sitting around, great — but know that if it has already been formatted, you will need to reformat it (read: clear it of anything stored on it) before it will work with your console. Transfer any data off the drive before you format it or those files will be lost forever.