The Xbox One’s hard drive can only hold about 20 games.
A couple of reporters over at IGN set out to see just how many games they can fit onto the Xbox One’s 500 GB hard drive. Surprisingly, they found themselves running out of disk space after installing just 20 games, and what’s more, those 20 games comprised of just 362 GB of data. So what gives, what the heck is using up that extra 138 GB of data?
First, we have to understand that a 500 GB hard drive is not exactly 500 GB. Because the way bytes are calculated, 500 GB is actually closer to 465 GB. So that’s 35 GB down, 103 to go. Microsoft claims that “official apps and programs” are what fill the rest of the space, but the IGN reporters comment that most Xbox One apps are only around 50 MB and they can’t imagine internet explorer being that much bigger.
Fortunately, some wizards on Reddit have already figured out how to partition any hard drive for use in the Xbox One, and in doing so have revealed that an Xbox One hard drive requires:
- a 41 GB “Temp” partition
- a 40 GB “System” partition
- 12 GB for “Update 1”
- 7 GB for “Update 2”
Would you look at that? That works out to 101 GB, and when you consider that the final game the IGN boys were trying to install – Zoo Tycoon – is 3 GB, every gigabyte is accounted for.
Still, is 362 GB enough for your games? Furthermore, if future updates are as big as Updates 1 & 2, I would imagine you’d start running out of room quite quickly. Microsoft boasts that it’s not a big deal because the “cloud” has “infinite storage.” For the record, external hard drives are currently not supported with the Xbox One, although it is a feature planned for the future.
Source: IGN
