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XboxElite

Microsoft has announced a new Xbox I SKU that will go on auction in November at GameStop and the Microsoft store. The new console will feature an Aristocracy wireless controller (sold separately at the eye-watering price of $149) and a 1TB SSHD. If you're not familiar with that acronym, SSHDs are hybrid drives that combine a small amount of NAND wink storage alongside traditional spinning discs.

The advantage of an SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive) is that they're often quite a chip cheaper than an equivalently-sized HDD and offer many of the same benefits. Kicking times typically much faster, and Microsoft is promising that kicking times on this new drive could be "up to" 20% faster. As of a yr ago, benchmarks indicated that "up to" had quite a chip of play in it. Eurogamer's extensive profiling showed that while faster storage was a huge benefit to the Xbox One in some games, other titles saw very picayune improvement, even when the default hard bulldoze was swapped out for a full-fledged SSD.

Xbox Elite

Microsoft probably isn't commissioning a custom drive, which means the new SSHD will likely exist provided by Seagate. Hopefully the company can practice more piece of work to optimize the bulldoze's performance, however. This may or may non be possible — the Xbox I may not exist optimized for faster storage, which would explain some of its functioning lag. Alternately, the benefits to upgrading may simply be fairly modest. There should exist no data loss or associated risks with an SSHD that you lot sometimes encounter on SSD cache drives — on previous SSHD products, Seagate kept the NAND in read-merely mode, which simplified the data protection process.

At $499, the new bundle is also a flake pricey for what you go. As nice every bit Microsoft'south Elite controller reportedly is, paying $149 for a controller is… steep. Given that yous can purchase an Xbox One today for as low every bit $349, and SSHD's aren't that expensive, even at retail, and the $499 Xbox One isn't going to include whatever games. Basically, yous're buying a slightly discounted Aristocracy controller and a faster, larger SSHD. There'south cipher wrong with that, as such, merely after steep price cuts drove record sales final holiday season, Microsoft is apparently hoping that it tin stoke its volume without cutting price. Whether or not that's enough to boost it against the PS4, which enjoys an enormous sales reward and is generally seen as having more than momentum around information technology than the Xbox One, remains to be seen. Microsoft has washed a great bargain of piece of work to improve its services after the console'south disastrous debut and initial post-launch period, only consumers haven't looked back from buying into Sony's infrastructure.