Xbox One will not support external hard drives at launch

As we get closer to the official launch of the next-gen consoles, we keep learning new things about them. The latest piece of information about the Xbox One comes courtesy of Microsoft spokesperson Larry Hryb, better known around the Internet as Major Nelson, who confirmed during PAX Prime 2013 that the console won’t be able to support external storage at launch.

Hryb has stated, however, that Microsoft plans to let Xbox One users use an external hard drive if they find the 500GB of internal space in the console to be insufficient. He just said that it won’t be a launch-day feature.

No external HDDs at launch? At least we’ll get them later

“The Xbox One will ship with the 500 GB hard drive, all of them have that,” Hryb said. “The future plan is for definitely to support external storage much like we do on the Xbox 360. My understanding is that feature will not be there at launch, because the team is working on some other things, but it definitely is on the list. I don’t know when it will come in though.”

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Back in May, in an interview with Engadget, Microsoft’s Albert Penello had revealed that the internal hard drive of the Xbox One will not be user-replaceable. He did, however, confirm that the console is equipped with a few USB 3.0 ports which can be used for external storage. External hard drives can be used for everything the internal storage does. For example, you can download, install and run games on the external hard drive, and even record gameplay footage using the Xbox One’s Game DVR feature.