Xbox greatly expands storage options to more than 16TB, but doesn't address the biggest issue

Microsoft has significantly expanded the amount of storage you can add to your Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S console, by lifting the 16TB cap for external solutions.

However, as that applies to external storage only, it doesn't really affect your Xbox Series X/S games, as they can't be run from an external drive.

The Verge reports that new beta software for Insiders has started to roll out to consoles and it enables the use of a single drive larger than 16TB by supporting multiple partitions and reading from those as if it was one storage option.

You will need to reformat your external drive if you want to use the new capability and the beta is only available to those on the Alpha-Skip Ahead program at present, but it'll likely roll out to the wider community too, in the coming weeks and months.

The only real reason is, will you ever need to use that much external storage?

Aside from power users and developers, who might use their Xbox consoles for more than gaming, 16TB is already an excessive amount of space. You could fit 320 games on that drive if you take into account the average file size of an Xbox Series X title is around 50GB.

But then, they won't even be able to run from the drive. You would have to transfer each game back into the console's internal storage before playing it. If you have fast enough broadband, you might as well just redownload the ones you want to play.

External drives can be used to play Xbox One, Xbox 360 and original Xbox games from, but do you really need local storage for more than 600-700 games?

Perhaps a bigger issue to have solved is the pricing for the official Xbox Storage Expansion Cards. Both Western Digital and Seagate make them and they are grossly overpriced in comparison to similar-sized M.2 SSD cards for PS5, even during sales periods.

A 1TB WD_Black C50 card is currently £127 on Amazon in the UK (down from £149.99). However, you can buy a 1TB PS5-compatible SSD card with a heatsink from around £65.

It's a similar story in the US and Australia.

So, while it's great that the option for an immense amount of external storage has been unlocked, I'd much rather we get cheaper options for the storage expansions I'd actually use.