| zarx said: 17MB/s is the fastest minimum standard for SDHC (tho aparently they have increased that to 20 since last time I checked, and I made a typo there hen I put SDXC), some companies do make faster cards but they are not gureenteed to work at that rate all the time in all readers and they report peak rates rahter than minimum. But readers are not the bottleneck for card speeds which is why you can buy Class 4 cards which are slower no matter what reader you use. Faster cards are still far more expensive than a slower card to manufacture you are still looking at double digit prices per card vs sub $1 for a disc and the price of Blu-Ray discs is droping as well. You point out you can get a 32GB SDHC card for $15, but you can also buy a movie on a 50GB Blu-Ray dis for $15 and 70% of that price is the licensing for the movie. Discs are still far cheaper per GB and will be in the near future especially if you are going to be using high speed SDXC cards. |
Once again I'm going to point out that I'm not talking about using them now. I'm talking about the point that SDHC and SDXC prices are constantly decreasing (so that you can now get a 16 GB SDHC card for the price that you could get a 1 GB SD card for in 2006), whereas BluRay disc prices haven't really decreased by that much - maybe halved in price, if that. The reason for this is that BluRay discs aren't in any way subject to Moore's Law and its related effects - there's really no way to "refine" the pressing of a BluRay disc, beyond perhaps making the process a bit faster or a bit more energy efficient. On the other hand, SD-type cards are strongly subject to Moore's Law and its related effects.
What this means is that, while it is true that, right now, an SDHC of 32 GB is more expensive than a BluRay of 25 GB, this is not going to remain true. And the point I'm making is that using SDHC or SDXC based cards (I wouldn't actually use SDHC/SDXC itself - I'd go with a proprietary variation of it) would allow card sizes to grow with time without requiring new hardware or new firmware. What's more, they would be significantly more compact and less subject to accidental damage.
Consider that even the DS has some games that are as big as 512 MB, now. Indeed, when the DS launched, the largest you saw was 64 MB, up to 128 MB in 2005. By the end of 2010, it was up to 512 MB. Meanwhile, neither DVD nor BluRay discs have increased in size since 2006 (not counting those requiring new firmware/hardware). Card sizes can increase pretty much without limit, whereas discs are practically locked to certain sizes. So if a developer wants to make a game requiring, say, 256 GB of data, they can do it, and it's not going to require more than 5 BluRay discs. It just ends up somewhat more expensive to produce... but then if you're making a game that big, presumably you've already thought through the costs involved.
In short, it pretty much future-proofs the game delivery mechanism (no, downloadable games don't do this, because you can be sure that all potential customers will have storage attached big enough for the game).
