Xbox One will not support external hard drives at launch, functionality will come later

Written by Brandon Hofer on September 02, 2013

Xbox One News: Major Nelson reveals that the Xbox One will not support the use of external hard drives on day one but that feature is on the way.

Xbox One is coming out later this year and lately there has been some pretty good news coming out of Redmond. It seems like the other shoe has dropped somewhat though with a recent revelation on Major Nelson’s latest podcast. The revelation in question is that while Xbox One will support external hard drives, it won’t support that feature at launch. The Xbox One launches with a 500gb hard drive that can not be removed so there have been some people (myself included) who were planning on buying a hard drive so they could connect it on day one and be good to go. Now it will probably take a little while to fill up the 500gb on the Xbox One hard drive and truly need the use of an external hard drive, however, an external hard drive connecting to the console is such a basic feature, how is this not available on day one? Perhaps it is due to the fact that Microsoft had to change so many things around after the internet “expressed their disappointment” with the original direction the Xbox One was going in. Or perhaps it was never planned to be a day one feature and we all just assumed it would be because, why not? It isn’t like it is an innovative feature or anything.

Listening to Major Nelson’s latest podcast he mentions this at around the 37 minute mark where he says, “My understanding is that feature will not be there at launch because the team is working on some other things, but it definitely is on the list. I don’t know when it will come in though.”

Now, clearly, launching a console is something that is very difficult and no one knows the challenges that lie ahead of Microsoft except for the people on the Xbox One team. The same can be said for Sony and the PlayStation 4 team though and, yet, I can swap out their 500gb hard drive on day one and be good to go. The XBox One’s ability to be connected via the USB 3.0 port was confirmed earlier this year and if you really are required to install every game you want to play then that hard drive might fill up pretty quickly. No one knows how large the games will be in the next generation but we do know some of the games for the Xbox 360/PS3 generation were in the double digits in terms of how many gigabytes of hard drive space they would take up. I think it is a safe and obvious assumption that games for the Xbox One and PS4 will be even bigger as the machines themselves are more capable and developers will continually be trying to do more and more.

What do you think about this revelation? Do you plan on buying an external hard drive for your Xbox One? Have you already bought a hard drive for your Xbox One? Tell us what you think below.