29% lost to the OS
Anyone who buys an Xbox Series S will probably find themselves scrambling for extra storage before too long. Or, they’ll have to resign themselves to a life of installing and uninstalling a bunch of games.
Now that next-gen consoles are making their way into the wild, we’re getting some consumer reports on exactly what we can expect out of the box. Reddit user spead20 was lucky enough to find that their Xbox Series S showed up a week early. Can’t complain about that!
Someone asked them how much usable storage the Xbox Series S has out of the box. Spead20 confirmed that 364GB of the console’s 512GB SSD is actually usable after system updates are applied. That’s 71 percent of an SSD that’s already fairly small.
The options are to pony up for the 1TB proprietary SSD, make use of an external USB HDD that doesn’t offer game optimizations, or to simply juggle installs. A silver lining is that Microsoft previously confirmed that install sizes will be about 30 percent smaller on Xbox Series S because it won’t require 4K texture packs.
But, to frame this against the file size of one of this year’s surefire most popular games, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is a 136GB install. When we’re working with these kind of numbers, you can see how it’ll turn into a problem pretty quickly.
