WD_Black Xbox Series X|S Storage Expansion Card Hands-On

wccftech.com:

For several years, Seagate's licensed Xbox Series Storage Expansion Cards were the only option to expand the storage of Microsoft's current-gen consoles while being compatible with Xbox Velocity Architecture and maintaining Xbox Series X|S SSD performance. To offer players an alternative, Western Digital has now also launched its storage solution for Xbox Series consoles - the WD_Black C50 Storage Expansion cards.

Of course, Xbox Series owners are able to add additional storage to their consoles using external SSDs, but they are generally a few seconds slower when it comes to loading compared to the internal SSD storage of the Xbox Series consoles. Also, it should be noted that Xbox Series-optimized games can only be run from the internal SSD or through the storage expansion slot. In addition, using the dedicated storage expansion slot instead of using one of the USB ports can be considered a plus when using other peripherals. Seagate's storage expansion solution for Xbox Series didn't come cheap, although Seagate recently dropped the price of its cards.

So how does Western Digital's memory expansion for Xbox perform and how does the price of these cards compare with Seagate's storage solution? Let's find out, shall we?

For this hands-on article, we tested boot times, loading times, and file transfer times of several Xbox Series-optimized games as well as older non-optimized games.  The purpose of testing the older non-optimized Xbox One titles was to see how the C50 Xbox Storage expansion compared to an external SSD attached to the Series X (we already tested out this external SSD some years ago).

First up are file transfer times from the external SSD to the WD_Black C50 Xbox storage expansion, the Xbox Series X internal