Xbox One will feature external hard drive support soon

Microsoft recently teased a feature that Xbox One users have been asking for a long time: external hard drive support. ‘XboxOneDev’ posted a short but revealing comment on Reddit, and a link to an image that pretty much tells the whole story. The user was confirmed to be an actual Xbox developer so it’s unlikely that this is just another rumor.

The post titled “Adding more hype on the list of things to come” includes a picture that shows external hard drive support for Xbox One. XboxOneDev also teases us with a “Soon…” message, just in case Xbox users weren’t hyped enough by the image itself. Needles to say, the Reddit post became very popular very fast and has gathered 286 comments at the time of this writing.

Right now every Xbox One comes equipped with a 500 GB internal hard drive. The one depicted in the image shows 585.9 GB free, which means that an external hard drive was already added when the picture was taken. A pop-up with the message “External Drive Ready” is also displayed on the screen. User kftgr2 has done the math and arrived at the conclusion that the total usable storage will be around 830 GB. The remaining memory is reserved for saved games, console software, and other system functions.

“A 500 gigabyte drive lists as 465GB in the OS due to conversion from 1 billion bytes per gigabyte to 1024³ (or 1,073,741,824) bytes per GB.

The XB1’s internal drive’s 465GB has 100GB reserved for the OS and 365GB for content.

The picture shows an added 500 gigabyte external drive, giving +465GB of space. 365+465 = 830 :)”

External hard drive support would be just what the Xbox One needs in order to sway more customers to Microsoft’s side. The PS4 is currently still leading in the console wars, but for how much longer? Recently Microsoft announced that a Kincet-free Xbox One will be made available starting with June 9. This version will be cheaper and will possibly come with a performance boost as well.

All these Microsoft announcements are sure to make Sony a bit nervous, but I’m sure the company will come up with something to even the odds. We have no idea when the external hard drive support will make its way to the Xbox One, but the dev did mention “Soon….”