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: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: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.

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