Facepalm: The ongoing AI craze has turned entire categories of technology products prohibitively expensive for a majority of customers. So much so that that enthusiasts are discovering alternative ways to reuse old(ish) storage devices to improve their PC storage setups.
The storage pricing situation is so bad right now that in some cases using an older expansion card designed for a gaming console can be a better option than purchasing a new SSD. A Reddit user recently shared an experiment with Xbox expansion cards, adapting the seemingly proprietary format for use in a standard PC. These cards are now cheaper than some budget SSDs despite offering similar or better capacity.
Unlike the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series consoles use non-standard Storage Expansion Cards made by Seagate and Western Digital for external upgrades. However, these cards are based on the CFexpress standard, a type of removable media that uses the NVMe protocol over a PCIe interface.
An Xbox enthusiast adapted a spare 1TB expansion card for use in a PC with a low-cost CFexpress Type B reader connected to an available PCIe slot. The setup worked, providing about 920GB of additional storage without complex or expensive modifications. Read and write speeds aren't exactly blazing fast, falling short of PCIe Gen3 theoretical limits.
For comparison, my Gen3-based SSD drives (I'm running two Samsung 970 Evo Plus models) can easily achieve three times the speed of the expansion card in question, but I digress. The Reddit user notes that speeds around 1GB per second are sufficient for storing games, personal files, and other data, while still delivering about twice the performance of an older SATA SSD.
Other users reported they had to modify the plastic casing on their Xbox expansion cards to fit them into CFexpress readers, which may also apply to other PCIe based adapters. Given the current pricing situation, that extra effort may be worthwhile to pursue this one-of-a-kind storage upgrade project anyway.
In recent weeks, the Xbox community has noted that expansion cards are now often more affordable than standard internal SSDs. Listings on Amazon show Seagate Storage Expansion Cards priced at around $200 for 1TB and $276 for 2TB.
This approach will not solve the broader storage pricing issue for most. However, Xbox owners who already have one of these cards may find the experiment a practical way to add storage capacity while avoiding current SSD prices, at least until market conditions improve.