Geldorn on 20 July 2008
The two advantages optical media have today (I'm feeling this will still be true at least one more generation) are price and longlivety.
The later being most important right now, HDD's just don't last as long as a DVD or Blu-ray discs. And with proper care (and a good drive), the same goes for the drive reading them.
Still, installs are a good feature (on any console). Lower loading times and less noise are always good.
SSD as a medium for next-gen consoles would be very neat, but I'm thinking that any change in format is more likely to be to straight flashmemory cards (not drives) and a built-in ram/hdd cache for improved streaming.
