Got an Xbox Game Card, but want more storage on your PC instead? A handy CF Express to PCIe adapter makes that work, letting you insert the card into a regular desktop PC - as Redditor /u/Dramatic-Shape5574 discovered this week. With the AI boom forcing SSD prices sky-high, this is a surprisingly smart way to repurpose existing hardware. Of course, it does assume that you bought one of these Game Cards in the first place and now don't need it for your Xbox Series X/S console.
The exact adapter that the Redditor used has now gone out of stock as others try to replicate their success, but any CF Express Type-B to PCIe or CF Express Type-B to NVMe adapter ought to work in much the same way. Most of these adapters are limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds, so you don't get the full capability of the card, but that shouldn't impact game load times too significantly.
As well as detailing the process, the Redditor also shared some synthetic benchmark results as part of their post. They saw read speeds of around 1100MB/s and write speeds of around 1500MB/s, with random (queue 32, single-threaded) read/write speeds of 684MB/s and 584MB/s respectively. That's faster than a standard SATA SSD, but some way behind a PCIe 3.0 drive that should max out around roughly 3500MB/s.
It'll be fascinating to see what the Project Helix next-generation console uses for storage. It's hard to imagine anything other than standard NVMe SSDs, presumably PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0 options, but perhaps Microsoft will want to retain compatibility with Series X/S Game Cards in the new console.
What do you think Microsoft should do? Let us know in the comments below.