(Credit: Will Greenwald/PCMag)
With storage and RAM prices skyrocketing, PC users are finding ingenious ways to avoid going broke. In one case, an Xbox fan with an old Series X expansion card got it working as an external storage drive on their desktop PC by using a PCIe CFexpress Type B adapter. They plugged in the old drive and just like that, had an extra terabyte of PC storage space.
The Xbox Series X/S console doesn't use standard SSDs for expanded local storage like the PS5, but instead only works with specific Seagate Expansion cards. Although these cards are typically more expensive than standard internal SSDs, recent AI-induced price spikes on SSD storage mean you can actually pick them up for less than equivalent standalone SSDs. The 2TB model is now around $275, while the 1TB model is less than $200.
In this case, though, Reddit user Dramatic-Shape5574 had one of these Seagate Expansion cards just lying around, so they converted it into something more usable. After buying a $15 PCIe conversion adapter for the CFExpress memory card standard, they were able to get the Seagate drive working on their Windows system without difficulty. They didn't even need to install drivers or make any tweaks to the storage card. Just plugged the adapter into a spare PCIe x4 slot, slotted the Seagate card into the adapter, and they had some extra storage space.
Drive performance isn't amazing, topping out at 1,117 MB/s for sustained read and 1,560 MB/s for sustained write. This and the random read and write speed results make this drive about a quarter the speed of a midrange PCIe 4 SSD, so notably slower than even PCIe 3 SSDs, which are cheaper, but harder to get hold of in 2026 due to global storage shortages. It's 2-3 times as fast as a classic SATA SSD, though.
As the user who completed this conversion notes, this is a real niche-case project. Seagate Expansion cards are no better than buying standard SSDs, even if they are a little cheaper; the performance drop is too big to ignore. But if you have a spare card lying around that you don't need and you could do with some extra space for your Steam collection, it's a nifty option that works rather well.