First console with an SSD

The first console with a SSD, or Solid-State Drive, is the Xbox Series X and Series S, which launched on 10 November 2020. The Series X has a 1 TB drive, while the cheaper Series S has a 512 MB drive. Both consoles have a port for a 1 TB external expansion drive.

Solid State Drives replace the spinning platters of conventional hard drives with non-volatile flash-memory chips ("non-volatile" meaning they can hold data when not powered on, unlike RAM). The advantage of SSDs is that they allow for far greater read/write speeds than are possible on conventional hard drives. The Xbox Series consoles can pull data from the SSD at a rate of 2.4 GB per second (4.8 GB per second uncompressed), around 40 times faster than the Xbox One could access information on its hard drive.

Faster storage access means shorter loading times and less of a need to page data in and out of the console's RAM, which improves performance. This technology has been common in gaming PCs for several years now, but had not made the jump to consoles due to the cost.