If you were planning to buy an Xbox Series X expansion card during the Black Friday sales season, take note. After many rumors, Seagate has finally announced that 512GB and 2TB storage cards will be available by the end of the year.

That means you don't have to wonder if you should buy one of the new cards before plunking down the money for a 1TB card. How much capacity do we really need and how much are we willing to pay for it?

We had already seen rumors about a 512GB expansion card and asked why there was no 2TB option. Fortunately, Seagate is aware of the situation, and with the ever-increasing storage capacity that games require, a 2TB drive would eliminate the need to keep track of SSDs in detail.

The downside is that the 2TB card costs $400, which is roughly the same price as the Xbox Series X itself and just under twice the price of the $220 1TB card. This large card will not be available until early December, so there will definitely not be a Black Friday discount.

For those who don't want to spend that much money, a 512GB card will be available in mid-November for $139. The capacity will only be about half, but you won't have to spend much more to expand your available storage.

Of course, there are several reasons for the higher price. The main one is that you can only play games on external storage that is as fast as the internal SSD, which typically requires a state-of-the-art PCI-e 4.0 NVMe drive. Another is that Xbox expansion cards are proprietary hardware and are currently only manufactured by Seagate.

Compared to the PS5, which has a generic SSD expansion slot, this would allow multiple companies to develop PS5 compatible cards. Increased competition should eventually drive prices down. However, since PS5 storage expansion is still new, it may take some time before that happens.

The good news is that previous generation games can be run from any older storage device, including USB hard drives. Current generation games, including Series X-optimized Xbox One games, can also be stored on a USB drive. This is to avoid having to delete the game files to download and install them at a later date.