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Memory Deal Bolsters Xbox 2 HD Removal Rumors
friedknut writes "According to a CNET News article: 'Flash memory maker M-Systems announced on Wednesday that it has signed a contract to provide storage products for future versions of the Xbox, bolstering speculation that Microsoft may ditch the game console's hard drive', since the flash-based memory devices will 'be of significantly higher capacity than the 8MB Xbox memory units Microsoft currently sells to save game and user data.' But of course, Microsoft representatives declined to comment on the company's plan for next-generation Xbox hardware."
The reason for this is that one of the reasons that the xbox has been a success is the ability to rip your music onto it and play it in your favorite games.
Do you have any source to back that up ? All of my friends who bought x-boxes got it modded and inserted a bigger hard-drive, not buying a single game for it. As I've mentioned in a previous post today, MS doesn't make money of the x-box sale itself. I seriously doubt that ripping cd's onto a harddrive and using it in your game is a huge reason people have for buying an x-box. I could be wrong though.
The GBA's screen was harder to see than the GBC's, and the GBA-SP removed the headphone port. Other than that, I agree with you.
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One of the reasons why the XBox supposedly has a hard drive installed is so that Microsoft could use it's failed Ultimate TV product to make an XBox that in addition to play games could also have DVR capabilites simply by dropping in a few extra chips and a bigger HD. I guess that plan has fallen into the black hole at this point.
I'm the lucky owner of an modded Xbox (1), and use it for a number of tasks. The only problem I have with it is that it makes too much noise. It's like having a computer running in my living room (yeah, I know it _is_ a computer).
:).
It's not the harddrive that makes all the noise, it's the fans. But why are the fans there? Because the XBox is hot. Why is it hot? Partially because of the harddrive.
So dropping the harddrive is nice; IF there is way to get the machine up and running something ala "XBox Media Player". My network and my computer would provide me with all the content I would ever need.
It would've been really neat if we could play games from the network too (legal copies of course), because gigabit ethernet provides all the bandwidth needed for such a task.
So to me, this might be good news
I disagree. You must remember that the vast majority of consumers in this market are not your geek friends, they dont mod....they wouldn't know what a mod was if you smacked them upside the head with a neon strip. (They'd probably think it was for your Honda, if anything)
A lot of my friends prefer the XBox simply because it DOES allow you to play YOUR music while playing most games. In fact many of them use the Xbox as their main entertainment center. (games, dvd's, music)
Nothing beats playing a good shoot 'em up while listening to some thrash.
MS -> MD (->MDCD ->32x) -> Saturn -> Dreamcast
remember that no console has removed major hardware functionality yet.
You mean like these?
And a couple minor ones:
For a start, nearly all XBox games exploit the fact that there are three 750Mb cache partitions used for temporary storage, in order to both minimise load times and act as swap space for programs that find the 64Mb total (i.e. including graphics) memory too much of a bind.
So unless they wish to add a hell of a lot more memory (this stuff doesn't actually need to be flash, however) then backwards compatibility is broken.
However, an XBox 2 with 2Gb of real memory would be fun to work with, I guess.
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That's per sector writes. If you have a decently large flash chip you can write 'smart' and spread your usage evenly over the whole chip.
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On the other hand, a flash card will be less useful on a cracked machine because they're not as durable as a hard drive. IIRC 10,000 writes is the mean time between failures for flash.
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Your friends must be exceedingly geeky if they all own XBoxes and no games, but modded it for a bigger drive. (Or was that just so they could store pirated games on the drive itself?)
Me and two of my friends, on the other hand, use the drive for XBox Live content downloads, shuttling save games back and forth, ripping music tracks and playing them during SegaGT, etc. The exact purposes Microsoft put it in there for. We buy games for the XBox, because we don't *need* cheap servers or do-it-yourself PVRs or whatever your friends are doing with theirs.
I would assume that the vast, vast majority of XBox owners haven't modded their machine or, if they have, had modded it only so they could play pirated games (which can still use the drive for the purposes listed above.)
I think the problem Microsoft has is that the 8 gig drive inside the XBox is great... but it's actually about 4 gigs bigger than 99% of their users need. (All of my friends and I, even with many CDs ripped, tons of saved games, and pretty much every free content download on Live downloaded, still see "50,000+ blocks free" when saving anything.) What they really need is a drive that provides about half the storage for about half (or less) the price... I can completely see the argument that the drive is too expensive. Flash isn't going to work... I would guess that this deal is just to make memory cards for the machine, not to make some kind of internal flash storage device. I would also bet that if Microsoft doesn't find their cheaply small HD, they'll default to putting in another 10 gig or 20 gig drive.
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