Could you give your opinion about my questions in the original post?
Not starting anything, but since i have seen the loadings in 360 games. Can a PS3 withouth harddisk achive similar loading times as the same game on 360? Asuming none of them have an HD.
For the same data... probably not. The scale of differences isn't too huge, but we are talking about games here. Gamers are the sort to be grossly dissatisfied by having to see a load screen for more than 5 seconds. All the while whining about "It shouldn't have to load! It's next-gen!"... "So what if there's more content? It's next-gen!"... "There's a load screen! That proves that programmers are lazy bums!"... "It's taking a long time to read a lousy 512 MB of stuff! I mean, what the hell happened to all this procedural generation crap? I never learned to do long division! I'm going to scream obscenities in German now."
Was the main reason to include a Hard Disk in every PS3 due to the slow transfer speeds of Blu Ray?
Definitely a big one, but I don't know about "main", considering that Sony also knew they had to make up for being behind on the whole online thing.
But in general, the fact that Bluray may be all right for big continuous chunk loads, but probably not so much for streaming does suggest that a hard drive would be invaluable for throughput purposes. That said, games that run on both 360 and PS3 have an issue in that the 360 is not guaranteed to have a hard drive, but the PS3 is, so their streaming systems may just have to be more direct to avoid complications (assuming this engine needs to be maintained for the development of more projects). Then again, some people will choose to tune to the 360 since it's easier, and say that they need the hard drive to get that kind of throughput on the PS3.
This one is more of an analisis. Do you think in the case of Sony adapting a fast DVD drive, would they have included the Hard Disk?
What's a fast DVD drive? I don't believe such a thing exists. That too, as much as I would have liked high throughput, there's no way that throughput and capacity can substitute for one another. If the Bluray drive in PS3 could get you throughputs like a 12x DVD drive or better (which indeed a CAV drive at minimum 2x would have done), then it really wouldn't stand to question which has the advantage.
All the same, there were more reasons than throughput. Of that, I'm sure.
Is electronic commerce a powerful reason to include a Hard Disk? I ask this because as i understand, the disk is a component that doesnt go down in price as quickly as other components during the consoles life.
Well, disk densities do tend to increase at a pretty reasonable rate and what may once have required two platters will later require only 1 and costs come down that way. There's a lower limit on how cheap a hard drive can get though since there are still all nature of mechanical components and vacuum seals and so on which all are pretty fixed costs. It really doesn't cost a whole lot more to make a 60 GB drive than a 20 GB drive.
But yeah, online distribution of niceties and online community garbage is a pretty big deal, and XboxLive does it pretty darn well. Sony knows they need to as well and having cheap, fast, large, and accessible local storage is pretty valuable in that regard. Everybody seems to pop up with the word "Flash" in this context, forgetting that Flash only fulfills one of those requirements -- it's only so-so for capacity and certainly not cheap for its capacity, and the last thing I'd call it is fast.
Are there any other powerful reasons to include a Hard Disk in a console? I've heard developers like hard disks so they can cache data but it isnt enough to have a fast DVD drive or in the future a fast Blu Ray drive.
It isn't enough. Well, if Bluray ever gets up to speeds like 8x CLV (or 21x-ish for DVDs), then it will have throughputs that are pretty competitive with hard drives (relatively clean hard drives), even though the seek and access times will still be around an order of magnitude slower.
