A new update for Xbox comes as a pleasant surprise to players as Microsoft is set to remove the 16TB restriction on external storage drives.
What this means is that Xbox owners can soon make use of more storage space on their consoles that what they are currently able to. Based on the announcement, it seems like there will be no hard limit on storage size following the removal of the limit.
New Xbox Update
It also means that Xbox drives will simply create more partitions for storage and each one will show up as a separate device on people's consoles. This will be the case even for players who plan to use only one massive external storage drive.
The announcement noted that the update will make sure that players will be able to access their favorite games at any given moment.
Additionally, Microsoft said that if players are already using a bigger external storage drive that has been capped at 16TB, they will have to be reformatted, according to Pure Xbox.
Doing this will let them take advantage of storage capacity beyond the previous limitations. The new feature is coming out to Xbox consoles today for the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring of Xbox Insiders. It will eventually make its way to all users in the next few weeks.
Removal of External Storage Device Restriction
Players who may still have a lot of games stored on the external storage device could make use of the new feature to make gaming a lot easier.
One thing to note is that games that are optimized for Xbox Series X/S consoles cannot be played from an external USB drive, Game Spot said.
However, the external storage devices can still be used to store the game data of these titles, which can then be moved onto the console's SSD or an NvME SSD expansion card.
The new feature is especially useful as game install sizes are increasingly becoming more and more lucrative.
The former 16TB limit was already a lot of storage for many indie and last-gen games but more modern titles will eat it up in no time. Some of these games include "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle," "Call of Duty: Black Ops 6," and "STALKER 2: Shadow of Chornobyl."
On top of the removal of the storage device restriction, Microsoft also noted that the update also makes finding discounts easier than ever before.
It said that a random subset of users will see a new badge being added to games that are on sale that players do not yet have access to, according to Windows Central.
