Should next gen kinda do away DISC DRIVES?

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Intrinsic said:

Pemalite said:

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.

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. 

Agreed. I see no reason whatsoever to go back to carts. Unless it's a tablet console like NSW.