Sony had user-replaceable hard disk since PS3. Microsoft never proposed this. I don't think it will change with this generation.

Even the PS2's optional hard drive bay!

PS2 was soft-locked to Sony supplied drives.

Nowadays that bay is very useful for booting games off any HDD. SATA is also supported by using a IDE->SATA board.

PS5 drives must also be pre-approved by Sony, supposedly due to strict hardware requirements, like 5.5GB/s[1] sustained bandwidth. I personally think it's silly, sure, bigger numbers mean better performance but I would be surprised if most games wouldn't work perfectly fine with a nowadays average SSD.

[1] https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/which-ssd-drives-will-be-c...

Ah no ps5 and xbox both have been designed for fast loading of game textures. Even the new nvidia and amd cards support the same so current games might be okay with slower drives but texture loading has been a bottleneck for 4k gaming which this solves.

FWIW you could put in a new HDD in an original Xbox, and put a 2.5" HDD in the 360 hard drive enclosure, but neither were officially supported.

With the original Xbox, they used hard drive locking that made it difficult to swap out to a new one. Its been a very long time since I've done it, but I seem to remember having a hard drive powered by a normal ATX PC, then swapping the data cable over from the PC to the Xbox while it was still on to achieve a HDD upgrade (with other steps in the middle that i've all but forgot).

It was a hassle for the 360 as well, you had to plug the drive into a PC first and run a homebrew tool to "bless" the drive so that it would work with the console

The proprietary memory card is going to be necessary for storing/accessing new titles designed to make use of their Velocity Architecture, any old external will do for games Xbox One or back-compatible games.

That's not entirely correct. You can use any regular old SSD: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/xbox-games-on-an-external-...

Not sure why they didn't enable storage tiering for regular external HDDs.

It would be far faster to move a game from external HDD back to the Velocity SSD before playing than to download the entire game again from the internet.

Feels like a money grab tbh.

> Not sure why they didn't enable storage tiering for regular external HDDs.

They did: "A USB 3.1 drive can also carry Xbox Series games as storage, which can be transferred to Series X or S's internal SSD or Storage Expansion Card to then be played."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-series-ssd-expansion...

During the last gen consoles, Sony folks have said on camera how they were quietly cheering when MS announced a price point way above what the PS4 was targeted at.

Maybe Sony expected MS to aim higher again, and this time it was MS who undercut.

It's also got a 1TB internal drive, with the memory card being *optional.