Executive Summary
- The proprietary storage expansion cards for the Xbox Series X|S have long been criticized for their high price relative to standard NVMe drives. However, technical analysis confirmed these cards utili…
Strategic Deep-Dive
The proprietary storage expansion cards for the Xbox Series X|S have long been criticized for their high price relative to standard NVMe drives. However, technical analysis confirmed these cards utilize the standard CFexpress Type-B interface, leading to community-driven hardware workarounds. By using inexpensive CFexpress-to-M.2 or CFexpress-to-PCIe adapters, users can now interface these console-specific cards with a PC.
Comprehensive testing by Redditors and hardware enthusiasts has shed light on the performance characteristics of this setup. Once formatted using Windows Disk Management to bypass the Xbox’s encrypted file system, the cards achieve sequential read and write speeds of approximately 1,560 MB/s. While this exceeds the performance of traditional SATA SSDs, it remains significantly slower than the 7,000+ MB/s speeds of high-end Gen4 NVMe drives.
This performance cap is inherent to the specific flash controller used in the Xbox cards, which is optimized for sustained console performance rather than peak PC burst speeds. Despite the limitations, this workaround provides a viable reuse for spare Xbox cards or a method for users to migrate assets across platforms, highlighting the thin line between proprietary console hardware and universal PC standards.
