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Datels 4GB Hard Drive for PSP Reviewed
PSP News writes "The announcement that Datel was producing a 4GB Hard Drive addon was just the thing the PSP Community was looking for and today Lik Sang has done a great hands on review of the product that provides more details and a much nicer price of $199 instead of the rather high $249 which was originally posted."
If you're going to use a battery-slurping technology like hard disk with all those moving parts, you should at least offer more than what modern RAM technology can store (i.e. the 1,2,4 GB range) on the disc since it wouldn't require any more size or power resources to go from 4GB HDD to 10 or 20GB.
You'd get a lot more for your money and could actually store all your portable data, such as a decent song collection in mp3/ogg/wma as well as some videos of TV shows perhaps and some photos.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
are you nuts? the psp would be the killer portable video platform, and it falls on it's face because they did not put a HDD in it to begin with.
If the PSP was a game,video, pocket tivo playback, mp3 player all in one with a nice big vivid screen it would start to take a helluva bite out of the ipod market share.
it had the potential, but as usual, sony stopped short.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So it also serves as bong?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well, for those who have legally dumped their games onto memory sticks and played them, the speed increase is *wonderful*. A lot of games have very low load times now (and it seems a few have hard coded delays since they show the developer/publisher/etc splash screens with no UMD/memory stick activity.
UMD is slow. Pathetically slow. (Slow enough that the UMDs often have dummy data near the beginning to shove the real data to the end of the UMD, where it can be read much faster, as well as possibly to make it easier to seek around). It's also nice that I can store my games in two 512MB memory sticks (plus have space for a few homebrew emulators). Much smaller than carrying a few UMDs and cases. This will be good for those with larger collections to carry around.
Plus there are a few that use it as their iPod Video... holds a few more movies. Or a few more MP3s.
Let's not kid ourselves. This is not about putting 4GB of video on the PSP, it's about 4GB of GAMES on the PSP. Right now there is a pent up demand for a larger storage device on the PSP. Many people who became aware of the cracked status of the PSP ran out and bought a 1GB memory stick. This allowed them to play about 95% of the games released so far. (A small minority are larger than 1GB in size without ripping content from the game). Several people, however balked at the high price of a 2GB memory stick. This 4GB device from Datel serves a very important nitch. The size of a single PSP game is now no longer a blockade to playing a pirated version of said game, and with several games coming in at 200-500MB each, this means one can carry anywhere from 3-10 (or more) games (plus a whole bunch of emus&games) on the PSP at once.
They must be using their GateCrasher chip to pull this off, since it has a memory stick interface.
I have a lot of respect for that firm. Standing up to Sony and creating some really cool products for their closed platform - the hard way.
I believe the neoflash team(a group working on PSP memory adaptors) was able to add up to 36gb on the PSP and have recognized, and haven't tested higher simply because their hardware can't do anything higher. By the way an average PSP game is ~600mb, a movie ripped off UMD is 1.8gb exactly, and a good-quality feature length movie for 2.0(H.264) is about 600mb while for 1.5(MPEG4 Simple) it's about 800mb.