Is that a Blu Ray drive or a circular saw? To deliver a mere 54 Megabytes per second throughput at 12* speed, the drive must spin at a noise inspiring 10,000 RPM. Actually sorry, my metaphor is misleading you, as the drive would be spinning at 3* the average rotational speed of a handheld circular saw. Sorry about that, but your ears will understand. 
Disadvantages of Blu Ray or similar drives:
- Loading times! Not only in game, but consider how long it takes to actually start playing.
- Mandatory installs, pretty self explanatory. Consoles are pick up and play devices not computers.
- Complicated supporting hardware. Consoles only require hard drives to make up for the failings of the optical drive format. Consider the cost of the drive, royalties to the patent holders for movie playback and the hard-drives that will be required too. Also consider the extra ram which would be required to essentially act as a cache. Wouldn't you rather the console be cheaper and/or more powerful instead?
- Noise! I love the sound of a 12* drive in the morning.
- Reliability, gotta love the fact that ramping up the drive speeds and using mechanical devices like HDDs make consoles lovely and unreliable.
- Scaling of costs! You love the sound of a pricecut just in time for Christmas. But between royalties, fixed expenses such as HDDs and Optical drives the hardware costs will stay sky high for a long time, or it will ensure that the next generation is 2 PS3s duct taped together. Two lovely thoughts, please dwell here.
I assume people know the advantages? Good, i'd like to move on now please.
Advantages of Flash
- Merely up to 16* faster than a 12* Blu Ray drive at up to 800 Megabytes per second transfer speed. Granted, its just a small advantage but I have to add it as my argument is pretty weak and shallow at this point and im kinda grasping at straws.
- 1/50th the latency of optical media, 0.2 MS vs 10 MS for most optical drives. Kinda don't need as much ram when you can call up data so quicky from the media huh? Who would have thought of using uber fast solid state memory, it hasn't been done before really. Sorry if this is really radical to you. Nin... someone might have in the past, but they suck and they are a long forgotten company anyway. Definately not a success in any way, shape, or form.
- Cost/Reliability/Simplicity/Useability of the console. Though to be honest im more hurt that I couldn't find a way to make cost with an "ity" at the end.
Just some questions I expect will be asked, so I will answer them here first:
Q: But what about the storage limitations of Flash? How will they be able to store full motion video when the storage will likely be limited to 16 GB at launch?
A: For future reference I will refer to "Filthy full motion video" as "FF" to make discussion easier. FF is used for two reasons. The first is to cover up loading screens, so therefore FF won't need to be used as some quick patch for the failings of optical drives and secondly if the consoles follow the glorious path of outrageous performance in a cheap package with flash, they can afford to do real time cut scenes instead of the "FF" way. Like the genius of Kojima with MGS4, only with 10* more pwnzer sauce. So without the need for FF, consoles would be just fine with much smaller disk capacaties. There are also forces such as procedural generation which promise to reduce the capacity required as well as new compression methodologies to get that juicy data free from FF packed into a smaller space.
Q: But the use of flash is so awesome sauce, how could they ever afford to use it?
A: By saving money on the hardware the console companies can easily afford to bear some of the burden of the increased media cost by not being so dicked up by selling hardware at an insane loss at launch. This cost should also scale down quickly with time and increased media size will become available. Remember Moores law? I almost think it might apply to Flash for some strange reason.
This is both serious and joking, so I look forward to your responses!
Tease.
