The Xbox Series X might boast a 1TB SSD, but you won't actually be able to fill all of that space with games and apps.
The Xbox Series X and Series S have officially been released. Tomorrow, the PS5 will join them, in some parts of the world at least. Everything and anything there is to know about the consoles has been discussed and dissected during the months building to their respective release days, and some topics have been covered in more detail than others.
Storage space is one of the topics that has been covered most, and with good reason. The space games take up on a console has been creeping up during the course of the PS4 and Xbox One's lifetimes. As has the cost of external storage devices on which to keep extra games and apps. That's why it might have come as quite a surprise to many that the Series X has a 1TB SSD, the same as the Xbox One X.
The thing is, 1TB doesn't mean 1TB. Well, it does and it doesn't. The Series X does indeed have a 1TB SSD, there's no lie here. However, some of that space is needed for the operating system and system files. That leaves 802GB left for you to store games, apps, and whatever else you might want to keep on your Series X. That's a slight improvement on the 780.9GB that was left to use on the Xbox One X.
The trouble is, that extra 20GB isn't going to cut it as the size of new games continues to creep up. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, for example. The newest installment in the CoD franchise will be released later this week and it promises to occupy a significant chunk of the SSDs of anyone who chooses to buy it. When running the game at its highest spec, Black Ops Cold War will need 250GB of space on PC, and possibly not much less on Series X.
There is hope, though. An update rolled out this week for Modern Warfare actually reduces the file size of the game by 25GB. There's also the possibility that Xbox Velocity Architecture will reduce the file size of games on Series X. Plus, file sizes of games installed on the less powerful Series S will be reduced by around 30%. However, the free space on a Series S is less than half of that of the Series X, so that doesn't really add up in the grand scheme of things.