I'm trying to get an Xbox One for a cheaply as I can. Right now, the 500GB console is the best choice in that regard. But some people have said that it's worth the extra money to get the 1TB console. To me the 500GB one is perfect for me because I only plan on playing a few games anyway. However, I might be missing out by not getting the newer model. How do I decide which one to get?

You can get the 500GB one now and a bigger hard drive later. Unless I'm mistaken (I'm too lazy to CTRL-T and Google it), the Xbox One doesn't use a proprietary hard drive enclosure or anything like that, you just buy a hard drive and put it in there.

As far as how many games a 500GB drive holds - well, I got mine in... August, I think? Whenever Best Buy was having that "buy an Xbox One and 40" TV for $500" sale. I'm already out of space, though if I uninstalled the Games with Gold stuff I'd probably have just barely enough for everything that isn't part of that subscription. Probably. Keep in mind, I'm primarily a PC gamer, so that's not a lot of games. Forza Horizon 2, Forza 6, Halo 5, Halo MCC, Destiny, Batman Arkham Knight, Titanfall Deluxe was on sale for $5 so I got that and never played it... I think that might be it. I rented Black Ops 3 and the Xbox One told me I had to uninstall something, so I got rid of Titanfall. You have enough hard drive space for a few games, but if you're the kind of person who likes to have as much of their library available as possible at any given time, you're going to need more than 500GB.

I had the same mindset when I bought mine that I'd only be playing a few games. I ended up using most of that space fairly quickly though and eventually opted for a 2TB external drive, which has actually been awesome. You could definitely get the 500 for now and if you ever need more HD space, it's literally just plug and play. Couldn't be easier to upgrade.

I've had my 500Gb since launch, and have done a pretty good job at managing the space. If you're the type who likes to leave a bunch of stuff installed on the system, an external 2Tb drive will suit you fine. I'm probably going to invest in one soon, since between the MCC and Halo 5, there's about 100Gb of Halo on my drive!

Xbox One uses external hard drives, so it's always easy to add more storage, instead of replace. I just checked, and the 500GB is actually about 364.9GB once formatted and the OS is installed. You need to remember that each game installs, and the size may vary: Sunset Overdrive is 26GB; Assassin's Creed Unity is 40.3GB; and I think I heard Halo 5 was 50GB+. So as long as you only play a handful of games, I think you are fine.

I forgot to look up the hard drive. In that case, I'll just get the 500GB one and upgrade later. Thanks for the replies everyone! :)

Black Friday you can get a 500GB Gears of War bundle for $200 which comes with a controller of course. I'd say that's pretty worth it if you want to keep that as your primary console. Also, the space is plenty enough for me.

I never fact checked it, but doesn't the 1TB Xbox have a SSD and load faster?

@deathstriker: There a hybrid 1TB SSD drive in the the Elite XB1, it's not a full on SSD but supposedly a bit faster, the externals are faster than the internal drives or at least that the way it seems that way for me.

yeah, and then if you run out of room just buy an external hdd

If you plan to do a lot of backwards compatibility stuff you might want a larger drive.

I could be completely wrong about this because I am going off of second-hand info from a fellow at last night's Extra Life event here in my city... but this guy said that with the backwards compatible stuff it downloads the entire XB360 game from the XB store with the emulation wrapper on it for each game you want to play, even if you have the game disc. If you are going to do a lot of 360 games on the XB One, it might fill up your drive pretty quickly if you don't want to do much drive space management.

I bought my x1 for halo so 500GB is good for me

Yeah, but a good external drive is also faster and probably cheaper per byte too. Unfortunately load times are not dramatically faster like you might see on a PC going HDD > SDD. A 40 second game bootup might get to just under 30 seconds at best.

@manicraider said:

I don't know what the price difference is but I bought a PS4 a year ago and haven't filled the 500GB hard drive. I haven't been paying attention tot the hard drive at all so far, I probably have 100GB of just saved videos that I never removed after uploading to youtube. 500GB seems like plenty to me.

Yah as a person that is tempted to get an XB1 this christmas.. or like, tuesday when Tomb Raider comes out, is it all 1TB XB1's that have the hybrid drive or just the "Elite" bundle?

I'm pretty sure it's every 1TB model. My advice would be to get the cheaper 500GB one that's bundled with a game and get an external hard drive later because that hybrid drive will not make much of a difference.

@spiceninja: I know I'm a crazy person but I actually would like to get a Kinect with the XB1 but not a lot of bundles with that in my neck of the woods. Also if I get the 1TB it just means I get to wait longer before I'm forced to either delete stuff or get a new external.

EDIT: Oh and the 1TB bundles also come with the new controller that has a headphone jack on the bottom.

@humanity: True, but getting an external will be cheaper in the long run and will perform just as fast as that hybrid. No matter what you use your load times won't decrease drastically and Microsoft having a hybrid drive in the box is just a fancy bullet point.

@manicraider: I would get the 1 TB drive if you are not planning on getting an external drive only of the amount of games that will be available to play and the size of those games are so big. The average size of a full game that has come out this year is like 50GB. Also you may not be planning on buying a lot of games but with Games With Gold you get like 3 or 4 games every month for free which can really fill a Hard Drive quick.