Xbox Series X reserves 20% of SSD space for OS

The first previews of Xbox Series X have started to come out, and it seems that besides being quiet and fast, you won't have the whole 1TB of storage available to use. Apparently, 20% of the storage is reserved for the console's operating system, allowing you to only use around 800GB of it for software.

As per IGN's hands-on preview, users will only have access to 802GB of the Xbox Series X internal storage. If a user wants to increase the storage capacity, there are two options: buy the storage expansion card or get a USB 3.0+ external hard drive. Data transfer and loading times from the Xbox internal NVMe SSD/storage expansion card will be faster than using a USB 3.0+ external hard drive.

Xbox Series S available storage isn't known yet, but it's expected that the install sizes will be smaller on it. Given that it will run games at a lower resolution than the Series X, textures won't have to be 4K, significantly reducing the size of the assets.

Ryan and others also commented on the “whisper-quiet” operation of the Series X. Ryan from IGN said that at idle the console he's “almost inaudible”, and while playing current-gen games “it's still pretty quiet”. This may change when running next-gen games that use more resources.

Loading times were also compared by IGN. Based on the Xbox One X loading times, the Series X is much faster, ranging from a little less than half (30 seconds) of One X's loading time (1:06 minutes) in State of Decay 2, up to 83% shorter (22 seconds) loading times in Fallout 4 (2:11 minutes). This is expected given how much faster is the storage solution used by Xbox Series X compared to the storage solutions of current-gen consoles.

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KitGuru says: Have you pre-ordered the Xbox Series X or are you still deciding which next-gen console will you get? Did you consider the Xbox Series X over the PS5 because of the extra storage?

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