I hope you aren't planning on collecting a large library for your Xbox One, because if you're knee-deep into video game collecting the pre-installed hard drive of the Xbox One will limit you to accessing only 20 retail-sized games at a time (depending on the size of the games).
Our previous report about the non-replaceable hard drive (unless you want to void your warranty) in Microsoft's Xbox One having only 391GB free for game storage was incorrect. I'm not afraid to say that I was wrong, the report was wrong, the information was not entirely factual.
The Xbox One actually only has 362GB free for game storage.
Super epic, omega fail.
So how was it discovered that the previous reports about the Xbox One's hard drive free space was incorrect? Well, IGN did a surprisingly thorough video to test the actual capacity of the Xbox One and it turns out that the free space available to gamers is a heck of a lot smaller than we originally thought... by 29 gigabyte. Now some of you might think that 29GB isn't much, but keep in mind that that's enough space to install Dead Rising 3 and FIFA 14.
IGN took time to install 25 apps – most of which approximated around 25 megabyte but some extended as far as 100MB – and that totaled 1.6GB. They also installed 20 of the available games they had on hand, which filled up 362GB of hard drive space on the Xbox One. When they tried to install Zoo Tycoon (which would have been the 21st game), they were all out of space.
Compare this to the PlayStation 4 and you can see that Sony's system offers you the option to replace the hard drive right out of the box with something bigger, and also offers 408GB of free space out of the 500GB hard drive. That's a 46GB difference, which is around the install size of 2K Games' NBA 2K14, a game that has an install size that clocks in at 43GB.
The video from IGN also notes that the save data and video storage is rather small, clocking in at less than 100MB. This means that minus the apps, which amount to 1.6GB – out of the 500GB hard drive – the Xbox One's three operating systems and OS reserves clock in at an absolutely massive 136.4GB.
Can you believe that? 136.4GB?
Just for reference, Windows 7 64-Bit Home Premium Edition with all the latest updates and Aero accoutrements clocks in at approximately 18GB. By comparison, that means that one of the more powerful, high-end versions of Windows 7 is only 12% the size of the Xbox One's operating system space. Also keep in mind that Windows 7 uses only a third of the RAM requirements that power the Xbox One's Windows 8-based tablet OS.
Any gamer, fanboy or Xbox fanatic who even tries to use efficiency, memory management or RAM utilization as an excuse for the Xbox One having better optimization than a PC just needs to sit in a corner and zip their lips like Link in every Zelda game that wasn't on the Intellivision.
Anyway, some gamers feel that filling up a hard drive with 20 games isn't that big a deal considering that the library of Xbox One titles is paltry at the moment. However, Microsoft has yet to roll out an actual release window for external hard drive support, so game collectors will have to start counting every megabyte to a gigabyte when installing a game because games certainly aren't getting smaller.
