Two years ago when the talk about next gen consoles turned real, specs started to leak out every day. Many hardcore gamers were hoping for terabyte hard drives on both the Sony Playstation 4 and the Xbox One. If they couldn’t get that, they would settle for the ability to upgrade their hard drive space.

While Playstation makes it fairly easy to upgrade your hard drive space, Xbox One does not. So you would hope with a 500gb hard drive what you see is what you get. That’s of course, not the case.

Extremetech reported that Sony reserves 92gb of the PS4’s 500gb hard drive for system use. That can include operating files and pre-installed apps. That leaves the Playstation 4 owner with just 408gb of space left over. Sony is upfront about this though, it’s a few clicks through the settings and you can see how much hard drive space is remaining.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has gone to great pains to make it hard for the average Xbox One user to find out how much hard drive space is available to them. The crew at Extremetech went through the process of downloading as many games as they possibly could to their Xbox One, to find out just how much space they had. Apparently after maxing out the hard drive they had used 362gb of space, which means that Microsoft takes up 138gb of space for their system files and pre-installed apps.

To put that into perspective for you, when the Xbox 360 was originally introduced, you couldn’t even buy external hard drives with 100gb of space on them.

If you’re not satisfied with the space available on your PS4, it’s apparently pretty easy for someone with a little technical know how to switch out the hard drive for a larger one. Exremetech posts those instructions here. It’s much more difficult to swap out hard drives on the Xbox One, but you can head here if you want to take a look. Extremetech does warn that the Xbox One process is “not for the average user”.

With these figures in mind the current version of the Xbox One allows for seven full length dual layer Blu-ray games. or 14 full single layer Blu-ray games. The Playstation 4 only allows for one more game of each type (dual and single layer).

To some, that may seem like a lot, however downloading full length games is gaining in popularity. Game system owners can now download their favorite new release the minute it comes out, without the burden of standing in a midnight release line at Best Buy or Game Stop.

If the life cycle of the current game systems stays relatively close to the previous cycle we could potentially have the Xbox One and PS4 around for the next 7-10 years. We would also expect (hope) that both manufacturers will release systems with larger hard drive capacities later on down the road, as they did with their previous consoles.