Storage Insights for Xbox Series X|S Owners: How Are You Managing in 2025?

Annually here at Pure Xbox, we survey the community regarding how effectively you might have been managing your Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S storage, and we’re hosting the same inquiry again for 2025 – a year where games are evolving to be larger than ever!

Reflecting on the previous couple of years, it’s evident that available space has become increasingly difficult to obtain. In 2023, for example, 40% of Pure Xbox voters indicated that their Xbox Series X had no available space on the internal drive, and this was similar for 51% of Series S owners. Those statistics rose to 45% and 58% in 2024, showing that over time, managing our Xbox storage has become more difficult.

The 2024 edition of this article was created in March of last year, and as the months progressed, we began to see many substantial games landing on Xbox. In fact, considering just the end of last year, titles such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Stalker 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 posed significant challenges for storage space!

Another query we typically ask in these articles is whether you are utilizing any form of external storage, be it via a proprietary Expansion Card or perhaps a more budget-friendly external hard drive.

In reality, however, these figures do not seem to change significantly from year to year. Approximately 25-30% of Pure Xbox voters who own an Xbox Series X had acquired an Expansion Card by March of last year, and the same applies to Series S owners. One consistent feedback is that Xbox users find Expansion Cards too expensive, with 34% of Series X owners and 41% of Series S owners indicating this in last year’s survey.

It will be intriguing to see if anything has altered as we approach 2025, particularly in terms of how many individuals have opted to obtain external storage, as well as how challenging it has been to stay below that 100% threshold.