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."

Comments

Goodbye to X-Box Convenience

[Channard]

This doesn't bode well for my purchase of an X-Box 2. One of the things that appealed to me about the X-Box 1 was the fact that you could run games off the hard disk. And before anyone starts going OMG! Pirate! - I put my own legally games on my X-Box hard disk. So all I have to do is shove the games in the cupboard, and then boot up my box and select a game. If the box 2 doesn't have this, I think I'll skip it.

Re:This will change nothing

[MoonFog]

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.

Re:This will change nothing

[iainl]

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.