Did everyone cover BYoM (bring your own media) already? As long as it meets certain requirements it could be used for local storage.
Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*
- Thread starter Cheezdoodles
- Start date
Did everyone cover BYoM (bring your own media) already? As long as it meets certain requirements it could be used for local storage.
Storage is required, whatever form it takes.
It makes no sense to argue that removing local storage is a saving that pays for the distribution media.
Cost per GB is the metric to be discussed.
Consoles local HDD cost $35 to the console manufacturers (selling the console around cost) for whatever size is the latest single platter. Was 500GB at launch, is 1TB now, and should be 2TB or more next gen. less than 2 cents per GB.
Opticals are dropping below 1 cent per GB today, and will be a fraction of a cent over the next gen.
Flash, be it for distribution or local storage or external storage... has to compete with what it wants to replace, and it doesn't by a factor of 10x.
It makes no sense to argue that removing local storage is a saving that pays for the distribution media.
Cost per GB is the metric to be discussed.
Consoles local HDD cost $35 to the console manufacturers (selling the console around cost) for whatever size is the latest single platter. Was 500GB at launch, is 1TB now, and should be 2TB or more next gen. less than 2 cents per GB.
Opticals are dropping below 1 cent per GB today, and will be a fraction of a cent over the next gen.
Flash, be it for distribution or local storage or external storage... has to compete with what it wants to replace, and it doesn't by a factor of 10x.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
Flash cost/GB are currently dropping faster than HDD cost /GB. By next gen launch it's entirely possible that costs will be comparable and/or cheaper per GB for flash versus mechanical. At equal or slightly higher cost per GB, flash may be more advantageous for console manufacturer's to use.
Optical is only suitable as a distribution medium nothing more.
A re-useable flash cart (or thumbdrive) could be used in place of console storage. Get rid of optical medium entire thus removing it's sunk cost from the equation for publishers and you could make game releases cheaper while still driving up profits for the publishers. That would offset the one time cost (or more if a user wants more re-useable flash drives) of re-useable media.
I just recently purchased a 128 GB thumb drive that is faster than any mechanical 2.5" HDD you can get for transfer speeds for ~40 USD. For random access reads, 2.5" HDDs aren't even remotely close. In a few years you'll likely to be able to get a 512 GB - 1 TB flash thumbdrive for ~50-75 USD. If a user can use that as re-useable game distribution media AND game storage media, I'd see that as a win. They could load games at say your local game store, supermarket, convenience store, gas station, whatever if they don't have internet or are bandwidth capped. Hell, you could load the game onto your flash media at your friend's house and take it home and use it on your console.
It's feasible, but I personally don't think the consoles will go that direction. They'll probably keep console storage. There's a decent possibility that they'll transition from mechanical to flash storage. Optical media, I believe, will become optional on next gen consoles. More so if Xbox becomes just a game console version of a Windows platform.
Regards,
SB
Optical is only suitable as a distribution medium nothing more.
A re-useable flash cart (or thumbdrive) could be used in place of console storage. Get rid of optical medium entire thus removing it's sunk cost from the equation for publishers and you could make game releases cheaper while still driving up profits for the publishers. That would offset the one time cost (or more if a user wants more re-useable flash drives) of re-useable media.
I just recently purchased a 128 GB thumb drive that is faster than any mechanical 2.5" HDD you can get for transfer speeds for ~40 USD. For random access reads, 2.5" HDDs aren't even remotely close. In a few years you'll likely to be able to get a 512 GB - 1 TB flash thumbdrive for ~50-75 USD. If a user can use that as re-useable game distribution media AND game storage media, I'd see that as a win. They could load games at say your local game store, supermarket, convenience store, gas station, whatever if they don't have internet or are bandwidth capped. Hell, you could load the game onto your flash media at your friend's house and take it home and use it on your console.
It's feasible, but I personally don't think the consoles will go that direction. They'll probably keep console storage. There's a decent possibility that they'll transition from mechanical to flash storage. Optical media, I believe, will become optional on next gen consoles. More so if Xbox becomes just a game console version of a Windows platform.
Regards,
SB
Flash will never cross that threshold versus mechanical, of course the rate of cost decline is higher on flash, it's still 25x that of mechanical. That will slow but none of the companies I've spoken too ever expect that magic threshold to be crossed. As flash densities have increased so have the densities of magnetic drives. We are all expecting it to cross the threshold where the extra cost is worth it to Joe/Jane Consumer (it arguably did that at 128GB) but not in absolute terms.
Let's not go over board on the perf of flash media either, if you have a large number of small files to copy (such as an expanded O/S ISO) then a USB 2.5" HDD will beat the pants off any flash drive on the market. Flash hates random bursty I/O, the numbers we all throw around are for sustained large file read/writes.
The other factor against BYOS is that it increases the attack surface for the manufacturer to guard against. What compromised the 360 was ODD firmwares allowing burnt DVD media to load. With BYOS you have to treat all media as trusted rather than using specialist ODD media which has yet to be compromised.
Here's 2008, the reason this thread exists, 2 years into the generation...
What is your prediction of nand cost per gigabytes at launch, and when will that be?
We are at the end of 2015, also 2 years into the generation.
This time for sure?
What is your prediction of nand cost per gigabytes at launch, and when will that be?
Not by 2017... http://www.computerworld.com/articl...and-hard-drive-prices-are-nearing-parity.html
however, question is when does close enough make it worth the switch. (ie. if a 1TB SSD and 3TB HDD are the same cost which do you opt for?)
however, question is when does close enough make it worth the switch. (ie. if a 1TB SSD and 3TB HDD are the same cost which do you opt for?)
SSD versus HDD isn't the issue, unless we're talking about distributing games on one of these! The internal storage can be either. The flash price question is for using flash as a distribution medium.
Selling blank media is no different to selling a console without an HDD and allowing people to use their own - the costs to store data are still there, just either spread across the life of the machine or paid for up front for a far more economical solution.
Mr. Fox is right on the money here - we need to talk about price per GB. The idea of using the game medium for downloads means the cost of storage is moved from internal device to this medium - it doesn't magically go away. So if HDDs are 5 cents a GB, and flash is 10 cents a GB, all that storage gamers end up using is costing twice as much. Furthermore the game media solution is grossly inefficient. You could use 10 GB of a 128 GB space on one game, and leave 118 GBs unused and unusable by other games.
Selling blank media is no different to selling a console without an HDD and allowing people to use their own - the costs to store data are still there, just either spread across the life of the machine or paid for up front for a far more economical solution.
You could use 10GB of a 128GB of space but you don't have to. If you have 10GB of game date you can put it on the smallest Flash storage possible. An ideal situation would be 16/32/64/128/256/512 avalible in flash amounts to a developer and they can choose what they want to release on.
A user could also buy an external drive to download data to it. The ps1 and 2 generations did just fine with out storage built into the console.
Like I said today you buy a console with an optical and standard hardrive. The hardrive is there to make up for the optical drives short comings. Today's optical drive are used simply to install a game .
Mr Fox and others have proposed that game sizes are only going to go up , however hardrive sizes have remained stagnant and are predicted to stay that way for awhile. So today's consoles have 20-50gig games and a 500 gig internal drive. Best on the market 2.5 inch drives top out at 2TB . If we increase game size past 100 gigs for next gen your going to have a very limited capacity for games.
Not to mention that drive speed increases have slown to a trickle . We will have new ram types , much faster gpu's and cpus and still the same slow mechanical drives next gen.
Flash prevents all of that and a company can choose to eat the cost or pass it forward. The cost of flash is something we can argue all day with two sets of numbers. If in 2015 your buying a 128 gigs of packaged flash capable of reads of over 100MB/s for $20 the price wont go up in 2018 or 2020 and the performance wont go down . It will improve by then.
Then we have to look at other area's also .
Sony fans loved the smaller size of the ps4 compared to the 3 or the xbox one. A console that removes both the hardrive and optical drive would be even smaller .
By removing parts that will cost over $20 and over $40 you can either price the console lower or put in more powerful components with that extra money.
You could also try and start a new media format for movies and entertainment. Bluray UHD is capped . A flash format that offered larger capacity and faster speeds would be a much better value proposition if a company choose to go that route.
Then of course there is the performance advantage in games. Faster read speeds allow for ram to be refreshed more often which leads to more unique textures. Larger capacity sizes allows for more textures to be used to fill larger and larger amounts of ram.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
You're off by an order of magnitude. Flash storage costs is roughly 2.0-2.5x the cost of a 2.5" Mechanical HDD. Or roughly 3.5x the cost of a 3.5" mechanical HDD. It hasn't been 25x for a long long time now.
Regards,
SB
Silent_Buddha
Legend
No prediction. Just like I'm not going to predict what mechanical drive cost/GB will be by the time the next gen consoles launch.
However, with flash storage hovering around 2.0-3.5x the cost of mechanical drives (depending on if you compare to 2.5" drives or 3.5" drives). And the cost of flash decreasing significantly faster per GB than mechanical, it isn't unreasonable to think that flash storage costs will be comparable to mechanical HDD storage costs by the time the next gen consoles launch.
Consoles are also unlikely to ever use 3.5" drives again. Which makes the comparison even more favorable for flash storage as it would be compared against the more expensive 2.5" form factor for mechanical drives. Compared to those, it isn't unreasonable for flash storage devices to potentially have a lower cost/GB.
Additionally when going into the lower stratum of devices. Flash devices can be made more cheaply than mechanical devices. While currently cost/GB for a mechanical platter is certainly cheaper than cost/GB for an NAND chip, a mechanical drive incurs significantly more cost for packaging into a useable device. Motors, magnets, PCB, cache, controller, case, etc. Where a flash device only requires the case, controller, PCB, and potentially some cache depending on the market segment the device is targeting. IE - you can make a flash storage device for 20 USD, but you can't make a mechanical storage device for 20 USD. It also doesn't help that at higher capacities (8-10 TB), mechanical HDDs currently require helium. Meaning that without changing how data is recorded onto platters, cost is going to scale much worse in the future for mechanical drives as capacity goes up. SMR and HAMR has potential (only SMR has shown up in a shipping drive), but waiting to see what long term reliability is like for those.
Samsung are the sole provider of V-NAND at the moment. Meaning there is little to no competition for them to leverage the price advantage it has over conventional MLC or TLC flash devices. Crucial will be producing V-NAND next year putting more downward pressure on flash drives.
BTW - this makes me sad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg
Regards,
SB
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HAMR is said to be scalable up to 100TB in a 3.5 by 2025. It was delayed to next year. SMR and helium were one time tricks in the interim.
Obviously if HAMR gets canceled, it's over, but the same can be said about planned silicon processes, and adding more and more layers. There are always risks.
Small capacity requirement cost less with flash. I agree. So it depends how much will be needed next gen. In the correct thread, I already gave my prediction of 1TB Hynix SSD in 2019 for PS5, it's a crap shot but I'm interested in v-nand competitors, specially the weird solution from hynix which might give them a short term edge with yield.
But this is all off topic, we are talking about distribution media.
Obviously if HAMR gets canceled, it's over, but the same can be said about planned silicon processes, and adding more and more layers. There are always risks.
Small capacity requirement cost less with flash. I agree. So it depends how much will be needed next gen. In the correct thread, I already gave my prediction of 1TB Hynix SSD in 2019 for PS5, it's a crap shot but I'm interested in v-nand competitors, specially the weird solution from hynix which might give them a short term edge with yield.
But this is all off topic, we are talking about distribution media.
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Comparing retail prices will lead us nowhere, specially around black friday and "limit 3 per customer" situations.
$114 for a 4TB at B&H.
The only 4TB SSD I could find in stock is $6000
https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/SanDisk-Optimus-MAX-solid-state-drive-4-TB-SAS-6Gb-s/3590606.aspx
$114 for a 4TB at B&H.
The only 4TB SSD I could find in stock is $6000
https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/SanDisk-Optimus-MAX-solid-state-drive-4-TB-SAS-6Gb-s/3590606.aspx
I'm kidding!
But it's nowhere near 3.5x, it's still at least 7x
But it's nowhere near 3.5x, it's still at least 7x
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D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
If there is a day when when flash storage is close to mechanic disc storage in terms of Gb/$$ it is beyond the horizon. Right now, the server market is driving advances in traditional HDDs and what's left of the consumer HDD market is the tail end of those innovations dripping into that market.
Capacities will also be the primary issue for servers, you can gain performance by going parallel which is why very few people in the server market really care that much about solid state drives. Of course if you could get a 1Pb of flash for the price of 1Pb of mechanic storage and without the need of going parallel that would be great but we'll have hover boards before that happens!
Capacities will also be the primary issue for servers, you can gain performance by going parallel which is why very few people in the server market really care that much about solid state drives. Of course if you could get a 1Pb of flash for the price of 1Pb of mechanic storage and without the need of going parallel that would be great but we'll have hover boards before that happens!
Rikimaru
Veteran
Not gonna happen. Discs will be always much cheaper.
Platform holders would prefer digital downloads anyway.
128GB usb flash drives can be had for around $30 now. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_s...8gb+usb+flash+drive&sprefix=128gb+usb,aps,216
In a few years it will probably $20. Any extra cost/premium on physical copies would actually benefit the platform holders by driving more people towards digital downloads.
Not to mention that wouldn't normal blu-rays be too small for the game sizes next gen? It would require multiple discs or the adoption of 4K blu-ray which would probably end up being more expensive than some sort of proprietary flash drive.
Rikimaru
Veteran
It's a huge markup. They would rather drop physical altogether.
100/128Gb BDXL would suffice. Current BD-ROMs are already able to read and even write them.
They would use better texture/data compression.
Do you realize current 50GB blu-rays cost somewhere around 1$ a piece to replicate in bulk. And that includes the profit for replicator such as sony. Also time it takes to make blu-ray versus writing and verifying a cheap&and slow flash is critical. Time is money when you are intending to replicate millions of copies. The new 100 and 66GB blu-rays will likely be very similar cost to old blu-ray discs for replication.
The place for flash is inside the console, not in a distribution media. At least not unless we talk about some removable ssd drive that you take to store and they download the game image there. Even if you had fairly highend ssd with ~500MB/s write speed it would take something like 3 minutes for you to buy a 100GB game. Imagine launch date and 50 people wanting to buy the game... That would be massive pain compared to just paying for the disc and going home... or better yet, buy digitally, predownload and just activate on launch date.
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