Xbox 2 Storage Supplier Says No Hard Drive

Loadmaster writes "Dov Moran of M-Systems, who recently closed a deal with Microsoft to provide 'customized memory units' for the next Xbox, spills the beans. He says Xbox 2 will not have a hard drive in an interview with the Israeli website Globes Online. No details on how their memory solution will replace the HDD, though." Regardless, Moran seems pretty confident in the agreement with Microsoft, so it's likely that the Xbox 2's storage system is now in M-System's hands. S!: Also worth noting is a GameSpot story which has an Xbox spokesperson claiming: "Mr. Moran is aimlessly speculating... we've made no such announcements about future Xbox products and services."

Comments

Backward Compatibility?

[aweraw]

So i guess this rules out any question of backward compatibility for Xbox games that make use of the hard drive... That is unless of course they stock the XB2 with 10G of flash memory, in which case, it's price tag is going to be astronomical... and what about the touted "Media Center" functionality of the Xbox? How will you rip your songs to the HDD if there isn't one?

Re:Backward Compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

The M-Systems stuff is identical, interface-wise, to a hard disk.

For the most part, at levels above the actual driver, nothing has any idea that it is reading and writing an IDE drive.

Re:Backward Compatibility?

[aweraw]

I have no doubt of that... but in terms of storage, how much is there going to be? Some games use swap space (though I'm not sure of the amount they utilize in terms of MB) I would expect that regardless of the hardware interface, they latency compared to an acctual hard drive will make them unplayable... In my experience, flash memory is *MUCH* slower than a fully fledged plater HD. Not to mention alot more expensive... The upside is, no moving parts to eventually wear down and fail...

/rant

DVD rw?

[Fiz Ocelot]

I wouldn't rule out MS putting in a re-writeable dvd drive. They retail under 100 bucks these days, so if they struck a deal with some company it could be rather cost effective.

Games didn't really use the HD much anyways. And I bet one dvd-rw would be enough to hold all the extra game content you download for a very long time.

Re:DVD rw?

[bluGill]

Think Sega Dreamcast, IIRC many Sega games had two tracks, one normal CD track, and one higher density track. Build a two part DVD, the inner part normal pressed DVD, the outer part (basically whats left after your game) DVD+rw. All the game save files go on the disk, just like GBA cartrages store saved games. If you want to do game updates, just press only a loader and a couple graphics images, and burn the rest.

This has a good anti-piracy measure: just turn the write laser on in the pressed part, and if there is anything left you know it is a real pressed disk and legitimate.

Microsoft has the money to design such a disk, and setup the manufacturing. Volume sales might never make up for the costs, but they have already prooven they don't care about profit too much yet.

Note that if I were going to design this I'd use a DVD-RAM for the writeable section, both because give more write cycles, and it is rare enough that most people can't write it. Do your lasers right, and even if someone manages copy a game to a rw (+/-), they won't be able to save any of their games.

Re:M-Systems Disk On Chip in there?

[Innominate Milquetoa]

Microsoft would likely be doing this because of the inability of hackers to easily replace the contents of a DOC with their own personal OS image, be it Linux or NetBSD.

Actually, I'd say it's to prevent people from putting their own 160G hard drives in and downloading game images to it. The XBox (not surprisingly) proved to be one of the easiest consoles to mod. There's even a purely software-based way to do it. Those who know this have approximately 2 legitimate copies of games (Halo and MechAssault), and about 30 illegitimate images sitting on their hard drives. A non-standard storage medium would make this kind of thing all that much harder.

Piracy?

[almaon]

Is it just me, or is the concept of the Xbox 2 not having a hard-drive seem possible as a direct influence of piracy?

With modchips and the internal drive, being able to play disk images right off the harddisk seems like this could be an issue for Microsoft.

Fastest way to find a needle in a haystack? Burn down the haystack...

Taking out the harddrive would be just that, elimating the problem.

Course it could be just a cost factor, who knows. All arm-chair analtics...

No Influence, Here

[Undefined Parameter]

Well, it looks like I'm in the minority who don't believe this guy.

I don't think he knows what he's talking about; the way that he keeps mentioning that he's looking out for the company's long-term survivability in regards to the company's track record of red ink reminds me of Tom Smykowski's nervous, angry interview with the Bobs in Office Space. The fact that he said that the Xbox 2 was going to have a "CD," not even a "CD Drive," rather than a DVD drive of some sort tells me that he's not at all familiar with what the specs of the Xbox 2 will be.

If I read the article correctly, M-Systems has had a total of one quarter of profit in fifteen years of existence, and this quarter will have them back in red ink. It sounds to me like the poor guy's in the process of jumping ship ("I personally own a lot of shares in the company, and I sell shares every quarter....") but doesn't want the public shareholders to beat him to it, so he's trying to sell everything M-Systems is doing as a Real Big Thing(TM), which will bring in "hundreds of millions to the company, spread over a few years...." In other words, I don't think M-Systems is anywhere near as important in the Xbox 2 development process as Mr. Moran would like to have us believe.

Then again, if such is the case we're back to square one with conflicting rumors and no solid statement from Microsoft either way. I'm hoping Microsoft does decide to include backward-compatability. If they don't, I'll not even begin to consider purchasing one for a few years.

~UP

Re:So what you're saying...

[a_peckover]

PS2 Online is utterly useless in comparison, though. It's a free-for-all mess, not disimilar to online PC gaming. You have to enter your internet settings seperately for each game, have different user accounts for different publishers, there's no cross-game invitation or buddy system etc. Compare that to the integration and relative simplicity of XBox Live.

Ummm...Everyone missing the obvious here?

[GameNutz]

Ok, the obvious answer here is:

Microsoft wants out of the office and onto the TV. Steve Ballmer has always stated that there is a bigger play for the XBox outside of video games. Would not be suprised to see a windows component for the xbox that allows, over your home network, to stream media from your pc to the tv. The HD for the XBox will be your PC.

This is a model that they have been pushing on for quite some time now and by tethering the 2 together, they reinforce their position in the home requiring XBox users to run Windows on their pc for the additional features the platform provides.

You heard it here first.

-GN

Re:Hard drive in some

[WorkEmail]

That is one possibilty, but I think they will want to keep things more simple than that. I know the games that are out for Xbox are made to recognize a HD. And they will want it to be backwards compatible, so I am guessing that when all is said and done it wil have a Hard Drive.

I have read articles that speculate that the PS3's content will all be online, the games you will download, etc. So Maybe Xbox will try to do some of that as well, focus more on the downloading of material and less on the games being in stores. It only makes sense if they can pull it off, they pay no shipping, no middle man, you just download the games right from them and that would be it, the only thing the stores would stock is the actual console itself and controlers.I don't think this is practical anytime in the next few years. I would guess maybe about 2007 or so something like that wil be done.

I am guessing the next Xbox will be the same exact thing almost, just more memory, faster memory, faster and bigger video card, and some new stuff to keep people from hacking it, and that will be about it. :)