Initial Unveiling And Launch
Industry rumors of new Xbox hardware had started as early as June 2018, with Microsoft’s Phil Spencer confirming they were “deep into architecturing the next Xbox consoles” at that time. The hardware was believed to be a family of devices under the codename “Scarlett,” including a low-cost version following a similar scheme as the Xbox One family of consoles, with major emphasis on game streaming and backward compatibility. By March 2019, further industry rumors had led to speculation of two consoles within the Scarlett family under codenames “Anaconda” and the low-cost “Lockhart” version.
Microsoft confirmed Project Scarlett at its E3 2019 press conference. Microsoft said they wanted a “soft” transition from Xbox One to Scarlett, with Scarlett supporting backward compatibility with all games and most hardware supported on the Xbox One. During a presentation at The Game Awards 2019, Microsoft officially revealed the design of Scarlett and its branding, “Xbox Series X,” as well as a late 2020 release date. Following the event, a Microsoft spokesperson stated that Xbox Series X constituted an entry in a fourth generation of Xbox hardware, which will be branded simply as “Xbox” with no subtitle.
On July 16, 2020, Microsoft announced that it had ended production of the Xbox One X and all-digital version of the Xbox One S in preparation for the new products.
Delete Unused Content In Call Of Duty Halo And More
Developers can also allow players to uninstall specific parts of games, which proves beneficial for those large installation sizes. This modular approach helps players pick only certain components, for example, keeping multiplayer but removing the single-player story once completed. There’s only a handful of games with support right now, but that already includes the biggest aiming to cut down their final size.
Some of the best examples include Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War and Call of Duty Modern Warfare, which can total around 150GB each. You can uninstall the campaign and multiplayer components if desired, or only install the Warzone component for a battle royale.
It’s incredibly flexible and helps reduce the frustration of that crazy file size. Other implementations include Halo: The Master Chief Collection, where players can choose which games are installed on their system. With more developers opting for this approach to mitigate growing downloads, keep an eye out for your favorite games.
The Xbox Series S Os And Features Feel Better Than Ever
The broader Xbox platform and accompanying services find themselves increasingly interlaced with the hardware’s intrinsic value, making the experience around the console just as crucial. This new generation follows several years of steady growth for the Xbox brand, with a mature Xbox One ecosystem, while also established on PC and mobile. That all filters into what Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S aim to deliver, with a returning operating system, games lineup, and accessories. It doesn’t bring a hard cut across the two console families, for better or worse.
It’s much of the same for returning Xbox owners, sharing an OS with the previous console, and delivering a near-identical experience in everyday tasks. The latest dashboard arrives in stark contrast to the Xbox One’s early days, which launched far from feature-complete while handicapped by a sluggish Kinect-heavy interface. The recent October 2020 updates bolster parity across generations, implementing a new UI refresh that pushes Microsoft’s Fluent design language.
Those similarities in many ways allow Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S to shine, which expands the platform features while also improving speed and responsiveness. The pop-out Guide menu no longer hangs between tabs, while your games library populates with tiles instantly, overall leaving both devices feeling great to use. New features enabled by next-generation technologies reinforce the perceived speed, even if less daring than the power advances in tow.
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What To Look Forward To
Well continue to test the Xbox Series X and Series S as software arrives, and well update this guide with our thoughts and impressions on the user experience accordingly. Additionally, Wirecutter senior staff writer Chris Heinonen, who is responsible for much of our television coverage, has tested the Xbox Series X as well as just about every major 2020 and 2021 television model with HDMI 2.1 support, and has screen recommendations for various budgets to get the most out of the new consoles.
Toshiba Canvio Basics Portable External Hard Drive 1tb
Expanding your Xbox storage doesn’t need to be expensive, and this 1TB hard drive is one of the cheapest options out there. It’s performant to support Xbox One games and older backward-compatible titles, while also ideal for offloading Xbox Series X/S games.
You can go big or go home with this 4TB behemoth from Western Digital, providing room for your full games collection for the average user. It offers four times the internal capacity that ships with Xbox Series X, proving an essential pickup today and all you’ll need as a next-generation sidekick. While SSDs are incredibly costly in these sizes, slower hard drives remain affordable right now.
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Xbox Series S Vs Xbox Series X
In terms of resolution, the Xbox Series X is better than the Series S. The Series X supports pretty much all games in 4K at 60fps, with support for up to 120fps. However, a lot of people dont even have TVs that support 4K resolution. Even fewer have a 4K TV that runs at 120Hz.
If you have a 4K TV or youre looking to upgrade soon, youll be able to get the most out of the Xbox Series X. If you have a 1080p TV and youre not going to upgrade anytime soon, you can save $200 and get the Series S which will support that resolution to the fullest.
See also: Should you wait for PS5 and Xbox Series X or buy a gaming PC today?
Though the Series S has a less powerful GPU and a smaller SSD, the lower target resolution will demand less from games. As mentioned earlier, the GPU has 4 teraflops of processing power. While this may seem significantly less powerful than the Series X with its 12 teraflops of processing power, its not actually that drastic.
The PS4 Pros GPU has just over 4 teraflops of processing power, and the PS4 is a pretty powerful console. The biggest difference in performance between the old consoles and the new consoles is the transition from HDD to SSD. And the Series S has that covered.
The Xbox Series S Is Handicapped By Its Storage Capacity
- By Joel Hruska on November 9, 2020 at 11:02 am
As the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 head towards formal launch, most of the attention has been focused on the top-end products in each stack, which is to say, the $500 PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, not the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition at $400 or the Xbox Series S, at $300. The console has gotten generally favorable reviews for its performance level, but theres a big caveat to be aware of one that could wind up costing you a pretty penny in the long run.
The Xbox Series S only offers the player 364GB of useable storage out of a 512GB base capacity. Were not concerned about the fact that the system reserves some storage for the OS and features like Quick Resume thats normal. The problem is, 364GB isnt very much space for the games that have already come out on current generation consoles, where titles can already run well over 100GB. Even if we assume that next-generation games grow more slowly, thanks to better compression algorithms and more efficient use of storage, weve already got multiple titles pushing past 100GB.
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Gb Of The 512gb Ssd Is Reserved For The Operating System And Essential Files
Have you played Xbox Series S?
Seagate Storage Expansion Card Features
The Seagate Storage Expansion Card is a customised internal PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD built using the Xbox Velocity Architecture. It is capable of delivering 2.4GB/s of raw I/O throughput. Thats about 40 times the throughput of the Xbox One! The Xbox Velocity Architecture API enables faster, reliable and consistent performance on the SSD. It also offers backward compatibility for games, which will help games load faster.
The Seagate storage card, which is advertised to match the performance of the Xbox Series Xs and Xbox Series S internal SSD, lets you choose to install games to the expansion card by default or play games directly from it. You can also move or copy games between local and external storage. The Quick Resume feature will work efficiently as well because it stores the data on the internal drive. It wont matter if you have the storage card inserted as it takes the game license details stored in the internal memory.
Take a look at the chart below to see how the Seagate storage expansion Card fares against the competition.
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Better Graphics On Old Games Great Graphics On New Games
The Xbox Series X and Series S feature a new generation of graphics hardware that is more capable than the components of previous consoles in a variety of ways. In most titles, you can expect higher resolutions, higher frame rates, and more detailed characters and environments compared to the same games on Xbox One or PlayStation 4, all with better image quality. Effects should also be more pronounced and sophisticated, as the new graphics hardware in these consoles can pull off greater amounts of fancy tricks like smoke and fog that has physical properties, and lighting that creates shadows and reflections more like it does in the real world.
At A Glance: What Is The Xbox Series S
The Xbox Series S is one of two new next-gen gaming consoles from Microsoft. Compared to the Xbox Series X, the Series S is a smaller, less expensive console. Its not as powerful, but it still packs enough punch to qualify as a bonafide next-gen gaming device.
Although it wont deliver 4K resolution , it still pumps out great-looking gameplay at 1080p and 1440p. Even better, it supports ray-tracing tech, which is one of the defining features of next-gen consoles.
Well get into more details below, but heres the short version: if youre in the market for a new console but dont want to spend $500 on the Series X, the Series S is a great option for you. Likewise if youre still struggling to actually find a Series X. The Series S is generally much easier to find around the globe.
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Xbox Series S And Series X Storage Expansion Card Now Available In 512gb And 2tb Flavours
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One of the defining features of current-generation consoles such as the Xbox Series S|X and PlayStation 5 is high-speed, SSD-based storage. However, Microsoft and Sony have approached the problem of expanding the said storage differently. Sony’s solution involves some mild disassembly, while Microsoft has opted for a plug-and-play route. The former lets users choose between many aftermarket SSDs, whereas the latter is restricted to proprietary hardware. Until now, one could expand their Xbox Series S|X with only a 1TB Seagate SSD. That is set to change soon, as Microsoft has unveiled two new storage tiers.
The Seagate-branded SSD for the Xbox Series S|X is now available in 512GB and 2TB variants. The former costs US$140 and is available for pre-order now on Walmart in the United States. Microsoft states that the expansion card will hit shelves in November 2021. Its availability in other regions will be revealed later. The 2TB expansion drive for the Xbox Series S|X will cost eye-watering US$399. That’s US$100 higher than the asking price of an Xbox Series S. It will be available for pre-order sometime in November and go on sale shortly after.
Listen You Are Being Surrounded
3D Spatial Sound is the next evolution in audio technology, using advanced algorithms to create immersive lifelike worlds that put you at the center of your experience.
Xbox Series X|S are the first game consoles to support gaming in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, which enhance gameplay with both full-spectrum visuals and immersive audio.
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Xbox Series S Has 364 Gb Usable Space
You’ll have a very small amount of available space to install games and media on the Xbox Series S, and we’ve confirmed it.
The hard drive space of consoles has become a hot-button issue for gamers over the last few years, as the size of games and updates has ballooned into the hundreds of gigabytes. For those who expect to pick up the Xbox Series S in a couple of days, and we some potentially upsetting news: the console only has 364 GB of usable space. First leaked online, we’ve confirmed this ourselves with a unit we’re testing for review.
That represents about 73% of the console’s 500 GB solid-state drive, which is around the usual fraction of usable space for consoles. However, since the size of popular games like can be over 100 GB–with patches that come in at dozens of gigabytes–that means that most players will have to be very judicious about what games they keep on hand. The Xbox Series X will ship with a 1 TB SSD, with 802 GB in the way of usable space.For comparison, the Xbox One launched with a 500GB HDD. Only 362GB of this was available for use, and the system supports external HDDs.
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Now Playing: Xbox Series S Unboxing
The Xbox Series X and Series S release on November 10, and you can read our Xbox Series X review now. The PS5 comes out on November 12. If you’re still trying to figure out which one to buy, check out our preview of the Xbox Series X and our hands-on impressions with the PS5.
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Is There Anything You Can Do To Improve That
Well, the good news is that file sizes should be a lot smaller on the Xbox Series S as it wont be using the same texture packs. That means games should just take up less space, which should mean more games even though youve got a smaller amount to work with.
On top of that, itll become far more common to only install the bits of the games you want. That means no multiplayer if you hate other people, or no singleplayer if you cant stomach being alone.
Plus, you can actually buy official Microsoft memory cards for the console and you can still use your current external HDDs and SDDs as well, so its not all bad.
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Best Capacity: Wd 8tb My Book Hard Drive
With Xbox game installations now larger than ever, only amplified by Xbox Series X and Series S, digital hoarders may prefer the biggest drives out there. Xbox consoles support external storage up to 16TB, although this 8TB solution from Seagate likely fits the bill, with ample space at a relatively reasonable price point.
Opting for an 8TB external hard drive is realistically overkill for many, but if you’re an avid gamer, such storage can support dozens of games. It comes in a 2-pound package, containing a 5,900 RPM drive, translating to peak speeds around 160MB/s. And while Seagate has its Xbox-branded shells, including an 8TB variant, you’re looking at identical performance, but with a small saving here by ditching the Xbox branding.
That huge capacity means it has differences compared to others on this list, including an 18W power adapter required to fuel this drive. Whereas other smaller options often pull power over USB, this beast needs the wall outlet for support. You also get an 18-inch cable in the box, making for easy plug-and-play use with consoles like Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One.
If you want a drive suited to Xbox gaming, this checks the boxes with its USB 3.1 compliance and capacity. It has the same limitations as all USB devices, storing only Xbox Series X and Series S games while capable of playing backward-compatible titles. The speed, while outpaced by any SSD, still meets what’s needed for Xbox usage.
Is The Xbox Series S Worth It
Costing just over half of the Xbox Series X, the Series S seems like a bargain. Microsoft positioned this console as an affordable entry point for upgrading and new Xbox owners, but that doesnt necessarily mean its the right choice for everyone.
The company had to cut a few corners to get the price down, so that means no optical drive and less raw power. The Series S targets HD gaming at 120fps and doesnt do native 4K output at all . That means it isnt technically much more powerful than the Xbox One X.
Even if you dont already have an Xbox One, the Series S looks much better. The all-digital approach might put off collectors, but when paired with an Xbox Game Pass subscription, youll instantly unlock hundreds of the best games from previous generations. As time goes on, it will fill up with next-gen titles, too.
The combination of an Xbox Series S with Xbox Game Pass is the best value you can get in gaming right now. That said, if the price isnt an issue, the Xbox Series X will outmatch it across the board.
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