

Ask HN: Do you think games consoles will ever use SSDs? - simonhamp

Back at the tail end of the '90s when Nintendo released the N64, it was a shock to see that it was still cartridge driven. These were the days of the PlayStation and the beleaguered Saturn that were wholly CD-based.<p>Nintendo boasted about performance, the fact that loading times were so quick, but were hampered with limited memory and poor graphics. Nintendo have always controversially positioned themselves seemingly just behind the opposition, bringing their unit prices down, but shipping an absolute butt load of them, e.g. the Wii.<p>There was something in the N64 cartridge story though that resounded with me at the time, which is why I wanted one more than a PlayStation. I never owned a PlayStation. But when the Xbox came out, I leapt for that - especially for its blockbuster title: Halo.<p>The Xbox had a hard drive (a small one admittedly), and it struck me that at some point consoles would get to the stage of being like traditional PCs and the games would be 'installed' to the fixed media, obviating the need for the portable medium (by then the DVD). But the Xbox and its successor still use optical media more than anything else for game distribution and playback.<p>Now we're witnessing the end of the Compact Disc (and by extension DVD &#38; Blu-Ray)* with consumer broadband speeds increasing and downloading/streaming becoming an ever more present reality. It's not surprising then that systems such as OnLive have come up that aim to make use of this increased bandwidth more fully, cutting the cost of the physical hardware to a minimum.<p>But it strikes me that Nintendo were right all along. They were just unfortunate victims of poor timing. Now that the overall cost of solid state memory is dropping as more and more consumers adopt the idea, I can't help but feel that the N64 would've been more of a success had it been built today.<p>But this question isn't about the N64. It's about the viability of Solid State memory as a storage and distribution medium for games consoles. Is it viable, or will it be leap-frog'd by the likes of OnLive?<p>* I appreciate that we will probably have CDs and their derivatives for a while yet, notwithstanding the fact that Sony are determined to keep flogging their dead Blu horse. The fact that people say they want a physical medium doesn't change the fact that it's essentially a dead medium.
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wmf
No, games will not be distributed on flash; they'll just be downloads. High-
end consoles will continue to have >100GB hard disks because the space is
needed to hold multiple games and movies and hard disks will continue to be
cheaper than flash. We may see low-end consoles with small amounts of flash
for the high-end casual gaming (?) market.

