Should next gen kinda do away DISC DRIVES?

[Mr Puggsly]

Pemalite said:

Mr Puggsly said:

I hear ya, but aside from disc being cheaper they hold a massive amount of space. Flash memory holding comprable storage space gets expensive. In a few years I expect games to be on 100GB discs.

Games could be streamed off Bluray discs as well, I believe installations became standard because its easier for development and HDDs are ultimately faster. Also, games are often so heavily patched these a HDD has become necessary. Some physical copies of games are basically just using the disc as a key now.

Stacked NAND is only getting better. In a few years I wouldn't be surprised to see 128GB configurations become more economical.

As for streaming... A 6x Blu-Ray drive is only going to have 27MB/s transfer rate speeds. Which is fine for data that is large and sequential.
However a Blu-Ray drive also has high latency in the realm of 50-150ms depending on drive speed and what part of the disc the lazer is reading on.

A NAND-based device can start anywhere from 100MB/s and have latencies of a good (I'm being conservative ) 5-10ms.

So whilst Blu-ray can stream data. It simply sucks at it. It's always been that way.

HDD's are slower than a good cart, especially in random reads, but you are right about the other advantages HDD's bring.

It would be nice if one day, Nintendo allowed for it's carts to be writable so games can be updated and have DLC added.

Ofcourse greater storage space in NAND will become cheaper over time, but developers will often opt for smaller carts to save money. It always happens.

Even with HDD's you get into the greater storage for less money argument.

Anywho, we've really dragged this conversation on too long. Carts are expensive, especially for a signfiicant amount of space. They seem to work okay for consoles not pushing cutting edge visuals though like portable devices.