| Pemalite said: Stacked NAND is only getting better. In a few years I wouldn't be surprised to see 128GB configurations become more economical. |
Unless I am mistaken, the current consoles from sony and MS don't do traditional data streaming like the disc based consoles of old. Previously (PS1,PS2,PS3/XB,360) incorporated data streaming from the disc to system memory during play and the last gen consoles took that a little further with combined streaming from both the disc and whatever part of the game was installed on the HDD. But today we have full game installs where the streaming is only done to get the game data copied over to your internal HDD while you are playing the game.
Now why that is all important is because it negates whatever benefits there are to be gained as far as carts are concerned unless of course the size and form factor is of paramount importance. To try and explain:
The platform holder currently expects all games to install to the internal storage. Thats because they are sure they get all round better gaming performance and faster data streaming from that internal drive than a disc. And even faster than a cart. So as far as functionality goes, all the disc (which in this case serves as no more than a container) does is allow you move its data to your internal drive. This can already be done relatively quickly and is a one time affair.
Its important you remember that; now taking all that into account, they already have a medium that can offer great transfer speeds (internal storage), so why not opt for the cheapest container (discs) possible? Cause to use carts, whose only benefit is the improved transfer speeds is somewhat redundant, especially when you consider all the other technologies popping up in with regards to data storage.
So ideally, they should stick with discs as that will always (or at least for the forseeable future) offer the cheapest solution as a container for large amounts of data. And instead build in support for things like SATA 3 or better yet, m.2 NVMe iterfaces for the internal drives as those will offer significantly better transfer speeds than a cart could realistically ever manage.
TL;DR, makes no sense having both carts and support for SATA3 SSDs (300-550MB/s) or even m.2 NVMe SSDs (1800-2500MB/s) as the bandwidths offers by the carts wouldn't ever be used and would instead just serve as a cost limiter.
| nanarchy said: First huge glaring problem is with your timeline, SSD's are not going down in price and in fact are expected to rise by as much as 20% this year and is the reason you still see most laptops etc coming standard with 128gb or 256GB SSD. 1TB SSD's are sadly unlikely to be affordable in the near future for consoles. Personally I would love to see the eradication of spinning media, USB or SD Card support for physical purchases combined with digital content on a large SSD. Just unlikely to happen till well after your suggested dates (at least not at a reasonable price) |
The price pike the industry is expecting to see now is just a temporal thing and is due to the ridiculously high demand for SSDs (of the m.2 form factor to be exact. Everyone making a laptop or hybrid device today is trying to put one into their device. It will normalize once the facilities are in place to match that new demand and when it does the prices will crash even more.
And make no mistake, compared to what the cost of SSDs were just 2yrs ago, prices have really come down. And its all just simple economy of scale, with everyone switching to SSDs the cost of SSDs will drop. Right now you can get a 512GB m.2 SSD for as little as $150 on amazon. Thats retail pricing today. A similar drive would no doubt cost around $75 in 2020. And would cost significantly less for OEMs to aquire. Now even though the drive in question is still a sata based drive, that would most likely be the kinda drives we get as standard in the nextgen consoles because the m.2 interface would work with both sata and NVMe drives. That way they allw users swap out their drive to a faster one if they want. It would also take up less space than having a HDD bay in the console.
| Barkley said: World isn't ready for digital-only, you'd be cutting off half your market who don't have internet fast enough or data-caps large enough to download games, especially when next-gen the games will be even larger then the usual 40/50gb. We'll be going to the cloud when we ditch physical media on consoles anyway, not digital downloads. |
Nothing about what I have said or this thread is suggesting DIGITAL ONLY.
