Western Digital has released its official Xbox memory expansion cards, the first alternatives available to the Seagate cards that were available when the Xbox Series S/X launched in 2020.

The new C50 drives come in 512GB and 1TB variants, costing £89.99 and £149.99 respectively. Currently, they only seem to be available through Western Digital’s own website, but will presumably turn up on Amazon before much longer.

And to help you fill up the extra space, each drive comes with a 1-month subscription to Game Pass Ultimate.

Comparing pricing between the new Western Digital drives and the original SeaGate drives is a little tricky because the SeaGate ones can typically be found on sale. You can often find the 1TB SeaGate drive for around the £150 mark, but the 512GB version doesn’t stack up as well, currently costing £109 at Amazon versus the Western Digital 512GB drive’s £90.

It’s great to finally see alternative drives becoming available for Xbox. This will hopefully mean the prices will start to drop because right now upgrading the storage on a PS5 is far cheaper. In fact, Western Digital’s own 1TB licensed drive can be bought for £100 at Amazon right now, or you can grab the much chunkier 2TB version for £170, giving you double the space for just £20 than it costs for a terabyte on Xbox.

Although the best deal is probably a 1TB Crucial drive for £68.99. Not a bad price to double the space in your PS5. Now you can finally fit Call of Duty in it! And nothing else!

In theory, the Xbox’s method is simpler: you buy an expansion card and it is guaranteed to meet all the technical specifications needed to run games. Then, you just slot it into the back. On the Playstation side, you need to double-check that any NvME drives you buy will be fast enough, otherwise the console won’t accept them, and installation is very slightly trickier since you have to remove the side plate. Don’t be fooled though, the whole operation is about as tricky as hooking the PS5 up to your TV.

The reality, though, is that Microsoft’s propriety concept means that memory prices have stayed expensive for anyone looking to upgrade. I personally went with the cheaper alternative by buying a basic external HDD and using it as a mass storage device. That means having to transfer games between the internal and external drive, but at the time I had slow Internet and couldn’t justify the cost of an expansion card, so it was a good way of handling the situation. I still use it, and while it’s not the slickest solution, it lets me store heaps of Game Pass games.