Future of Physical Media in consoles - end of disks?

[Pemalite]

SvennoJ said:

Can it not always simply install from USB? I doubt ROM nor NAND will ever match stamping a disc. And what's stopping MS or anyone from adding an external blu-ray drive to the S?

What do you think the read speed will be for the 4K drives in the ps5 and Series X? I could only find something for the ps4, 6x speed, 27 MB/s and this

Here's an area where Xbox Series X hasn't improved: When installing from a disc. According to GamesRadar+'s preview coverage of the new Xbox, its disc installation times are almost identical to last-gen. The example given is that Titanfall 2 took about 35 minutes to install.
https://www.destructoid.com/stories/xbox-series-x-isn-t-any-quicker-at-installing-games-from-discs-607037.phtml

Yet that's installing from blu-ray, not BDXL. A 6x speed drive should deliver data from BDXL about 2.5 times faster unless for some reason it needs to spin slower for BDXL discs. The only other figure I can find is 144 mbps max for 4K blu-ray which is only 18 MB/s

You can definitely do installs via USB.
Only thing stopping an external drives to the series s... Is Microsoft.

Actually going to test to see if my external BD Rom drive is compatible with my One X soon.

I would expect next-gen drives to top out at around 36MB/s, the actual spin rate of the disks remains the same, but the data is denser, so it can transfer more bytes per second.

But you are right, BDXL is inherently faster.

NAND or ROM doesn't need to match optical in terms of price, it just needs to justify the additional price with a plethora of advantages.
In saying that... 16 Gigabyte flash drives can sell for about $6 AUD... And that includes the controller, port, plastic housing and so forth plus profits on top.

NAND is definitely catching up.

TheBraveGallade said:

carts can't, by nature, be too slow if console makers still want upgradable 'internal' storage. its just the matter of making a port fast enough.

remember, carts back in the 80's and 90's were basically an 'extention' of internal storage, a cart that uses a plug and play implementation of NVME slot will be as fast as any installable piece of SSD would ever be.

Memory relies on multiple chips to extract bandwidth via parallel memory transfers.
You are definitely limited in that aspect in terms of space and complexity.