Hard Drive Installs Take 2: The future and the present motivations for MS.

[Lone_Canis_Lupus]

Squilliam said:
Because consoles are closed box affairs they don't get held back by outdated PC standards if they are willing to spend the money and implement their own/different one.

A SSD on the end of a fast bus to the southbridge would be pretty fast and it could replace some of the ram expenses as needed data could be quickly accessed from the drive.

Optical Drive - 150ms seek (PS3) 100ms Xbox360 IIRC.
HDD - 10ms seek (Smaller laptop HDD spin slower than desktop)
Flash - 0.1ms seek.
Ram - xxx Nano seconds lol (something like 120 IIRC???!?!?)

Seek times go 100x slower on HDD vs flash and 10-15x slower on optical than HDD.

This means they could use the SSD as like a level 2 ram for persistant data and store the meaty stuff on the HDD/Optical media and the latency intolerant/frequently accessed data on the ram.

 

This would be perfect. Though I think Sony and Microsoft would probably have to be the ones to take a hit for the team on this one (again) considering Nintendo is mainly a gaming company. Sony and Microsoft could probably afford to take this risk...wishful thinking though. :/