Xbox Series X / S expansion cards are near their lowest prices for Prime Day

There’s a deluge of games coming to Xbox over the next few months, so you’d better have some extra storage handy. Xbox Series X / S owners only have one real option for newer games: the various expansion cards you can get from Western Digital and Seagate. Thankfully, they’re steeply discounted for the October Amazon Prime Day event. 

Exclusively for Prime members, Western Digital’s WD_Black C50 1TB Storage Expansion Card for Xbox is on sale at Amazon for $120.64 (about $37 off), very nearly its lowest price to date. You can also get WD’s 512GB card for $65.54 (about $14 off), a few dollars shy of its lowest mark.

Seagate expansion cards are on sale, too. They’re a bit more expensive, but they also don’t require a Prime membership. Amazon has discounted the 1TB Seagate Storage Expansion Card to $129.99 ($30 off), which is just $4 more than its all-time low. You can double up with a 2TB card for $199.99 ($50 off) at Amazon, which is the lowest price yet.

These cards sacrifice virtually no performance compared to the consoles’ internal memory. Other USB-based external storage options on modern Xbox consoles are limited to playing backward-compatible games or just temporarily offloading current games to save space on the built-in drive. But the NVMe-based expansion cards can run games and even support the Xbox’s Quick Resume function, allowing you to keep multiple titles running at the same time for fast back-and-forth switching.

With modern games consuming so much space, the built-in 1TB of storage on the Series X — or 512GB, in the case of the base Series S — fills up quickly. PlayStation 5 owners may be able to install a variety of much cheaper M.2 SSDs, but Microsoft chose the more straightforward plug-and-play method with its proprietary expansion cards, at a price.