drkohler said:
No can do. Protection mechanisms in the PS3 requires a SATA storage device. Either you design a second SATA bus onto the motherboard with the chip, or use the one available. The first solution would probably end up costing more than a hd. |
All right man. Tell you what; it's only going to be a few months until the official final product is available and the iSuppli tear down confirms what's inside. You roll the dice on what you think SCE engineers can or can't design.
If SCE engineers came up with a SATA interface flash card with a mere 16GB of NAND on it, the interface (SATA board) would cost about as much as the NAND itself, maybe a bit more depending on whatever contract SCE secured with a bulk OEM order of NAND chips.
It boils down to whether it costs more to design two logic boards, one with flash on board, and one without, assuming all new logic boards don't contain flash memory for firmware and firmware updates, in which case, the 16GB SKU would simply have more flash memory, adding maybe $5-8 to the production cost, tops.
As for the "protection mechanisms," I'm assuming it's occurred to you that with an all new designed logic board and overall hardware design, nobody but the SCE engineers who resigned the the hardware and management that approved the designs knows how the protection measures will work.
