WD offers Xbox owners more space for games

The term “hybrid” gets passed around often these days, usually in relation to cars and computers, but hard drives are about to get a hybrid of their own. Sort of.

That’s happening because Western Digital (these days known solely as “WD”) has found a way to hybridise a hard drive for console gamers and PC owners, building an external hard drive that will work on the Xbox One and Windows PCs.

The drive is part of WD’s “My Passport” series, and is called the “X”, though you’d be mistaken for thinking this is exactly like every other drive WD manufacturers, because this is a 2.5 inch external solution reliant on USB 3.0 that can be plugged into a computer.

When plugged into a computer, you’ll find a 2TB drive waiting for your files, but when plugged into an Xbox One, the drive will act as an external drive for storing games.

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“Game file sizes are expanding to 36 GB per game and upwards, and are projected to continue growing,” said Tony Tate, Vice President and General Manager of WD’s Content Solutions division.

“Console gamers are able to store on average only 10 games on the 365 GB out of 500 GB that is available on the onboard hard drive. The My Passport X portable drive delivers a fast and easy way to expand capacity and enables an expanded library of games on the go.”

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WD’s X drive is set to 2TB, and while we suspect you could probably plug in any hard drive to an Xbox One and eventually get it working, this one is performed to handle the Xbox One.

We’re currently checking with WD to find out if it will handle both the Xbox One and a Windows PC at the same time — our guess is yes — and finding out whether the Xbox 360 will be able to use this drive too, because some of us still run the last generation of console, especially while we wait for backwards compatibility to arrive on the Xbox One.

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For gamers that can’t wait and need more storage now, however, you’ll find the WD My Passport X in electronics and gaming stores shortly for a recommended retail price of $200.