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

great!

[msh104]

now we can store entire linux distro's on it instead of a hack to install a bootloader. :p

Xbox 2 hack

[Neo-Rio-101]

Well, now we know where the next Xbox hack is going to be launched from.

Bootable USB through a buggy game backdoor anyone?

This will change nothing

[RoundTop-VJAS]

The XBox 2 will still have a hard drive in it. 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.

This feature demands a hard drive as flash memory, while getting cheaper, does not have the amount of memory avaliable for 100+ songs for as cheap as a hard drive.

That said, I think we will see larger memory cards as saves get bigger, also I hope to see them drop in price.

Above all else, remember that no console has removed major hardware functionality yet.
NES->SNES->N64->GC was all upgrades, each having more features than before
GB->GBP->GBC->GBA->GBA-SP Same deal
PS1->PS2
Dreamcast-> damn you for going under. We loved you.

I look forward to the xbox 2, and while I may not be a person to preorder it, or even get it within 6 months of release, it is on my list of things to get.

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

[Eponymous Cowboy]

...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. This feature demands a hard drive...

Not true. At all.

Almost certainly, this feature will be kept, but simply moved onto your network instead. You will instead rip MP3s or WMAs onto your Windows PC and then share the folders over your wired or wireless LAN. Your X-Box will access your music files over the network.

And, it turns out, this makes considerably more sense than the current hard drive solution: What is the point of keeping separate MP3 collections on your PC and on your X-Box?

Re:This will change nothing

[LostCluster]

Furthermore, it creates great excuses to force people to use WMP... letting WMP playlists be seen by the XBox, allowing downloaded secure WMA files to be played (while iTunes AACs are out of luck), etc.

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.

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.

Some benefits

[Bega]

Seems like a good idea to me. Xbox having a hard drive, was a good concept, altough it had its pros and cons. The biggest con of it is the need to buy an external 8MB memory card if you would've wanted to move your saves to your friend's console (which made me wonder why not over ethernet..?). And on top of that, most games don't support the memory cards at all. And no, the music ripping feature wasn't really that great - not too many games supported the feature anyway.
Flash is probably a better (and perhaps more secure?) format for use, if they go on like Nintendo and invent their own formats on existing 'hardware' (Cube discs). I hope that the write times aren't the same as with console memory cards nowadays if you need to store big amounts of data.

Re:Wow.

[ameoba]

The thing is, the primary purpose of the HDD in the XBox isn't saving games; it's caching of data from the DVD. Doing this allows the XBox to get around the latency issues that are associated with using an optical drive for program/data storage.

Granted, having the system able to run programs off the HDD makes it somewhat easier for pirates; a modded XBox with a hacked BIOS allows you to copy an arbitrary number of games to the HDD and play directly off it, but I can't see them crippling the performance of the machine in such a significant manner (and we can rule out using flash memory as a cache, since that would result in heavily used XBoxen flat-out dying after a few years).

The hard drive will stay

[Openstandards.net]

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMOLRPG) demand hard drive space, so the HD will stay. Sony PS/2 tried it without the hard drive for EverQuest Online (Frontiers), and realized it was a problem because they couldn't significantly upgrade the clients with the self imposed 3M limit. Thus, FXII requires a USB hard drive in order to play. Those that play the games on PCs know that patches can include a lot of changes, which can require a significant download to upgrade the clients. Plus, the clients effectively cache maps and other things, creating large files to permit efficient game play. The hard drive will stay.

Re2: Wow.

[ByteSlicer]

This will perhaps make this kind of hack more difficult. Though I am fairly sure the x-box 2 will also be modded fairly easy.

A compactflash card in TrueIDE mode behaves nearly the same as a real IDE disk. The timings are a bit different, and the IDE disk requires more power (external source needed?). Other than that, a simple adapter would do the trick.

Re:Wow.

[-brazil-]

and without having to spend ~$40 or more on a hard disk for each console

...and instead having to spend rather more thant that on "a few hundred megs" of flash memory, the console will become more expensive and slower, while of the advantages you mention only the failure rate seems significant to me.

Anal-yst

[drewmca]

I agree with others that this analyst is doing his job, meaning talking out his ass.

The xbox2 may or may not have a hard drive. I believe that it will, for numerous reasons. But this is so obviously a deal to line up memory card tech that it's ridiculous. The analyst's description of what the hard drive is used for is absolutely naive and ill-informed.

Fact is, a lot of games use the hard drive. All don't but a lot do. Some you may have heard of, like Halo. I'd expect that the developers will continue to push for the ability to cache and stream off of the HD.

And lest we forget, the idea of backward compatibility goes straight out the window with no HD. We're not talking about obscure titles; we're talking Halo, DOA3, etc. Backward compatibility may or may not happen, but an analyst with any intelligence would have hit on this, and maybe started speculating out his ass about that. This guy wasn't even that clever.

Oh, and Live, the jewel in the crown of microsoft's console gaming experience so far, is extremely reliant on the hard drive. The downloads, the levels, etc., these are all huge selling points, great features, and they're just getting started. I believe that MS will try to make its major innovation push in the online arena, and the hard drive enables a lot. Without it, options are much more limited. I especially love the analysts who predict that online storage will replace the Hard drive. Do they have some insight into an unprecedented rollout of broadband technology that will make this actually reliable? Have they ever downloaded a level on Live, and thought about what it would be like to go through that every time you wanted to play the level? Obviously not.

And these people affect the flow of capital. Sheesh.

Re:Wow.

[h0tblack]

With the original Xbox Microsoft ended up with an extremely open and hackable console mainly because of their single-minded drive to get into the console market. It was a sensible decision, use hardware and software that you'r already familiar with, throw a load of cash at it, get a good market share.
We're now coming upto stage2 of the plan. Now microsoft have proved themselves as a serious player in the console market and gained some experience, they can look forward to the future. They're creating something that will be more of a traditional closed-architecture console in many ways and far far less of a pc-in-a-box. They'll have more control over the platform, less hackability and although through the original Xbox they've got a lot of users and developers on-side, they may have to prove themselves over again.