Is that a Blu Ray drive or a circular saw? To deliver a mere 54 Megabytes per second throughput at 12* speed, the drive must spin at a noise inspiring 10,000 RPM. Actually sorry, my metaphor is misleading you, as the drive would be spinning at 3* the average rotational speed of a handheld circular saw. Sorry about that, but your ears will understand.

Disadvantages of Blu Ray or similar drives:

• Loading times! Not only in game, but consider how long it takes to actually start playing.
• Mandatory installs, pretty self explanatory. Consoles are pick up and play devices not computers.
• Complicated supporting hardware. Consoles only require hard drives to make up for the failings of the optical drive format. Consider the cost of the drive, royalties to the patent holders for movie playback and the hard-drives that will be required too. Also consider the extra ram which would be required to essentially act as a cache. Wouldn't you rather the console be cheaper and/or more powerful instead?
• Noise! I love the sound of a 12* drive in the morning.
• Reliability, gotta love the fact that ramping up the drive speeds and using mechanical devices like HDDs make consoles lovely and unreliable.
• Scaling of costs! You love the sound of a pricecut just in time for Christmas. But between royalties, fixed expenses such as HDDs and Optical drives the hardware costs will stay sky high for a long time, or it will ensure that the next generation is 2 PS3s duct taped together. Two lovely thoughts, please dwell here.

I assume people know the advantages? Good, i'd like to move on now please.

Advantages of Flash

• Merely up to 16* faster than a 12* Blu Ray drive at up to 800 Megabytes per second transfer speed. Granted, its just a small advantage but I have to add it as my argument is pretty weak and shallow at this point and im kinda grasping at straws.
• 1/50th the latency of optical media, 0.2 MS vs 10 MS for most optical drives. Kinda don't need as much ram when you can call up data so quicky from the media huh? Who would have thought of using uber fast solid state memory, it hasn't been done before really. Sorry if this is really radical to you. Nin... someone might have in the past, but they suck and they are a long forgotten company anyway. Definately not a success in any way, shape, or form.
• Cost/Reliability/Simplicity/Useability of the console. Though to be honest im more hurt that I couldn't find a way to make cost with an "ity" at the end.

Just some questions I expect will be asked, so I will answer them here first:

Q: But what about the storage limitations of Flash? How will they be able to store full motion video when the storage will likely be limited to 16 GB at launch?

A: For future reference I will refer to "Filthy full motion video" as "FF" to make discussion easier. FF is used for two reasons. The first is to cover up loading screens, so therefore FF won't need to be used as some quick patch for the failings of optical drives and secondly if the consoles follow the glorious path of outrageous performance in a cheap package with flash, they can afford to do real time cut scenes instead of the "FF" way. Like the genius of Kojima with MGS4, only with 10* more pwnzer sauce. So without the need for FF, consoles would be just fine with much smaller disk capacaties. There are also forces such as procedural generation which promise to reduce the capacity required as well as new compression methodologies to get that juicy data free from FF packed into a smaller space.

Q: But the use of flash is so awesome sauce, how could they ever afford to use it?

A: By saving money on the hardware the console companies can easily afford to bear some of the burden of the increased media cost by not being so dicked up by selling hardware at an insane loss at launch. This cost should also scale down quickly with time and increased media size will become available. Remember Moores law? I almost think it might apply to Flash for some strange reason.

 This is both serious and joking, so I look forward to your responses!

Could they take flash memory and put it inside a SNES or a Genesis cartrige? Then have a console that looks like snes or Genesis and plays cartriges...yet plays Gears of War 3?

That would rock...

lol, my replacement DVD burner will be arriving tomorrow. ($20 with free shipping, go newegg!)

Would you like to kick the old one to the curb? It can't burn anything on DVD's anymore and it takes 10 tries just to get the tray to come out and even then, it sometimes doesn't open or close correctly.

The cost per gigabyte is still much higher than that of hard drives, so I'd prefer if the future was in downloadable titles. Granted, there are some problems with downloadable games, such as not being able to resell them, but if we cut out the retailer middleman the cost savings should make it attractive to many people.

Exactly!

Oh and they can do cool things with rewritable media (With DRM of course). Say you purchase a drive for $20-40 or maybe even get one free, you could go and rent a game from a kiosk at Best Buy/7-11 or whatever and pay your $10-20 and get say X time or one complete playthrough of a game instead of giving those nutters at gamestop a dime of your money. Makes developers happy and fills that hole in the market between used titles, rentals and complete purchases.

Those cost savings are only really attractive to the console owners who pick up a larger royalty and developers who get a larger slice of the pie. Retailers would have a fit if games were offered for less online than in stores so its unlikely those savings will get passed onto you anyway. Steam for example is still full priced IIRC.

That's why I said "cut out the middlemen". They can't last forever.

Flash will always be behind optical disks for one simple reason. 1 Flash card at 4GB costs £10-20. 25 DVD rewriteable DVD pack costs £15.

EDIT: Already mentioned somewhat...

Hehe so you want to go back to smaller sizes again? Fat chance this will happen. The point is that many problems of discs can be fixed with hard-disc cache. Games like Uncharted, Ratchet, ... show that this is possible without long loadtimes, without big install...

Flash may be the future for handhelds but definitely not for full games. Download to big hard-disc is more like it.

also flash media uses much less power! so it would help fight global warming!