External hard drives over 16TB in size will soon be supported by Xbox consoles, Microsoft has announced.
The addition of support for bigger external USB storage has been confirmed for Xbox Insiders, as part of a system software update rolling out now to public testers in the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring. As ever, this new feature will slowly filter out to larger testing groups before its widespread public release, typically over the next couple of weeks.
“We are enabling support for external USB drives larger than 16TB, so you can be sure your favorite games are always ready to play!” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
“Newly formatted drives that are larger than 16TB will be formatted with multiple partitions to utilise all available space for games and apps. These will appear as multiple devices in the storage devices list.”
Intriguingly, Microsoft does not list a new upper limit for storage devices – suggesting that with the partition methodology in place, there is no upper limit anymore. How big a hard drive can you connect?!
“Drives greater than 16TB that have already been formatted will be unaffected by this change and would need to be reformatted to take advantage of the updated support for larger drives,” Microsoft concluded.
For more on what’s next from Microsoft, be sure to join us tomorrow, Thursday 22nd January, for live coverage of the Xbox Developer Direct, beginning at 6pm UK time. We’re expecting to see more of Doom: The Dark Ages, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, South of Midnight and a couple of other surprises.