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EricHiggin on 03 February 2017
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Intrinsic said:
EricHiggin said:

I've wondered if XB might try and take a somewhat similar approach to this with Scorpio since they are ahead of PS in terms of ext HDD and transfers. PS has always tried to go for the one piece sleek console, but they didn't have that luxury with VR this gen, and they may not have that luxury with storage next gen. Depending on how far the next PS console is away, if they decide sooner than later, I would say this would certainly be a possibility. Also depends on how quick the tech evolves and how fast the price falls, and how much tech PS wants to try and stuff into a PS3 or smaller shell at a reasonable price. As long as transfers didn't have to be done with the controller, and could be done remotely, I would agree this type of idea is the better way to move forward in terms of storage.

Honestly, that would be a brilliant idea for the scorpio. Though I fear it will jut be too expensive to do it right now. 

As it stands, a 250GB NVme m.2 SSD costs $130 and offers read speeds of over 3GB/s. Now sayin bulk MS gets those at around $80/drive..... thats still a lot of money to spend on just 250GB of storage. Especially when $25 could get them as much as 1TB with a normal HDD.

But in another three years, there is no doubt in my mind that we have m.2 drives in the 512GB - 1TB range that costs as little as $60 at retail and even less as OEM suppliers. 

For XB it would be a great way to show superiority over Pro, if they could show super quick loading times for games. Regardless of how many seconds exactly they took to load, it should be so much faster than Pro that XB marketing could have a heyday with it. However, like you said, it most certainly would be quite costly in comparison to a much larger HDD/SSHD drive, and isn't something that is usually marketed to help sell the console to casuals, so it would be all on XB to eat some of the extra cost, and push a new marketing campaign on speed and less wasted time while having better graphics/res to boot.

I would guess that XB would only go this storage route if Scorpio ended up being designed more so like a next gen console and less of an upgrade like Pro. In that case Scorpio would cost more than Pro retail, yet still have to subsidize to some extent, which would make something like an $80 SSD a viable option. I would also have to assume that if Scorpio was designed in this way, that XB would leave out any extra storage whatsoever and leave it up to the gamer to purchase an ext HDD that met their needs, whether it be an official XB HDD or another brand. (They could also have an empty internal slot for a 2.5" or 3.5" HDD that can be purchased and inserted like the PS4 but it seems like XB is staying away from that and keeping things as simple as possible for users). Scorpio may also be an upgrade like Pro, just a slightly bigger jump, which XB may have to turn a blind eye to load times to keep the cost down to be able compete with Pro.

Three years down the road an SSD option will at the very least be affordable like you said, which is what PS clearly has been aiming for, the best console that can be built for an affordable price. With load times only getting longer in the future with current HDD/SSHD tech, there's good reason to believe SSD is a possibility come PS5, and would be most welcome.