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No Hard Drive Bay On PStwo
Thanks to Gamespot for the notification. Sony has confirmed that the PStwo will not feature a hard drive bay. "...consumers who want and use the hard disc drive are typically the more 'hard core' gamers, ... we feel that a majority of those HDD interested consumers already have their PlayStation 2 units."
Hard drives have a manufacturing cost floor. It's probably around $25-$30 to make the platters, the head, the voice coil, the casing and so on. Doesn't matter what the minimum capacity is, you can't beat those physical costs. Now, the hard drive manufacturer takes their profit and sells the device to the console maker. The console needs a few dollars more in parts (thermal, electrical, shock mounts etc) to integrate the drive. Altogether it's a significant amount of money against the wholesale price of the box.
Microsoft are hurting like hell right now because they have to pay that cost on every Xbox they sell and Sony doesn't. This is why Sony came up with that PSX console/PVR hybrid - they could offer a lot more functionality, charge much more for it and more than cover the extra manufacturing cost.
The 'sufficient' amount of RAM for a console is a function of many things. Sustained read speed from the optical disc, system bus bandwidth, processing power of the CPU and GPU. No point filling memory with data you can't express on-screen or that can't contribute to your simulation of the world. People also don't want to wait 2 minutes for memory to fill from the disc. If all of the other things could scale up, RAM would too - but then the system would be even more expensive.
As for the caching, Xbox already provides scratch space for games - 3 sets allocated on an LRU basis.
Graham
The absence of a bay for the HDD doesn't bother me as much as the fact that The Multitap for the current model cannot be used with the new model PlayStation 2 (SCPH-70000 CB). I believe that there are a lot more multitap owners (and potential future owners) than PS2 HDD owners.
I think a major reason behind the lack of hard drive on the new unit is due to the release of HD Loader over the summer. The HD Loader software allowed you to install a hard drive in the PS2 and run games from it without a mod chip. No soldering was required and the case did not have to be opened so the warranty was not violated. The hard drive attached to the network adapter and fit in the expansion port. Sony moved quickly to have the distributors shut down, but not before a lot of people had obtained the software. They were afraid of people copying friend's games or rentals to their hard drive.
I bought HD Loader and found many legitimate uses for it. I have young children and using HD Loader I copied all of my original games to the hard drive so they do not have to handle the game disks and take the chance of scratching them. I just leave the HD Loader disk in the tray so that everytime they boot they are presented with a menu of games to run. Load times have noticeably decreased. One of my kid's favorites had nearly a minute load time between levels. Running from the hard drive that was reduced to less than 10 seconds.