| JEMC said: Sure, because SDXC cards of 25/50 GB would be cheap... |
On Amazon.com, a Transcend 64 GB SDXC card costs $80 before price reduction (to $60). Even if we take that $80, then a variant of Moore's Law basically says that within 3-4 years, they'll cost less than $20. Likely less than that, because prices are still high from being new technology (and thus still being a specialty product).
It would be smart to start converting consoles back to card/cart based technology, since that technology improves much more steadily - they're saying that 2 TB is the limit for SDXC (like 32 GB was the limit for SDHC), and that'll be without any new hardware to read it. So if a system has an SDXC-type game storage system, space for a large game would no longer be an ongoing problem - earlier games would be restricted, but later ones would have plenty of space.
Not to mention that cards and carts are so much faster to read than discs. That was why the N64 had such short load times compared with the PS. It would be amazingly great if we could finally return to card/cart-based game storage.
It's also worth noting that a proprietary format based on SDHC and SDXC would also be an option - after all, the compact design of the SD-line of cards is intended for easy portability (and thus for use in small devices), which isn't necessary for consoles. And it's cheaper to effectively have four SDHC cards taped together (not literally, of course) than to have a single SDXC of the same size (an SDHC of 16 GB from Transcend costs $17, which means that four of them together costs $68, rather than $80). It might be four times the size, but it would be cheaper.
So there are real options for such an approach.
