The only ACTUAL problem with a console without HDD (PS3, x360) is this:

[Guden Oden]

NOISE!

As in, a 12x optical drive makes a lot of it! They also tend to become very warm after a while, and at least in today's consoles, the disc is constantly spinning during gameplay so there might be an issue with the life on the spindle motor, and it'll also burn quite a bit of power as well by going full speed all the time.

I'd guess though that the disc will "idle" at some lower RPM while the drive isn't being accessed to save on wear and tear, noise and power tho, but what will it sound like while going full tilt?

 

[mesyn191]

Not all of em make lots of noise you know, but then even if it does I don't think it'll matter much. Anyone else remember how loud the friggin' DC's GDROM was?

 

[Hardknock]

I'm more worried about the heat these consoles are going to kick out than anything else. My Xbox kicks out enough to warm my room in the winter! I can't imagine what these new consoles will do

 

[Inane_Dork]

NOISE!

As in, a 12x optical drive makes a lot of it! They also tend to become very warm after a while, and at least in today's consoles, the disc is constantly spinning during gameplay so there might be an issue with the life on the spindle motor, and it'll also burn quite a bit of power as well by going full speed all the time.

I'd guess though that the disc will "idle" at some lower RPM while the drive isn't being accessed to save on wear and tear, noise and power tho, but what will it sound like while going full tilt?

It must be my slow day. I don't see the connect between an optional HDD and a noisy DVD or BR drive. I would think them to be independent of each other.

Hopefully, these companies have picked optical and magnetic drives that are fairly quiet.

 

[BlueTsunami]

It must be my slow day. I don't see the connect between an optional HDD and a noisy DVD or BR drive. I would think them to be independent of each other.

Hopefully, these companies have picked optical and magnetic drives that are fairly quiet.

I believe hes talking about the game streaming off the Optical Disk instead of an HDD.

 

[Titanio]

What would the rotational rate on a 2x Bluray drive be like? I'm guessing it might be quieter?

 

[wco81]

There's a brouhaha brewing because there's a bug in Madden 2006, which lets you tell if your CPU or human online opponent is going to run or pass.

Well an HDD would make it more difficult for publishers and developers to weasel out of patching things like this.

But you know, even for $20-30, you should be able to get 32 MB cards at a minimum, which should be plenty for patched executables. But an HDD would make it so much easier, because you don't have to manage which patches you need since they would probably take up more space than most game save files.

I know they don't want to patch but I'd rather have a patched game than a seriously flawed game.

 

[Guden Oden]

It must be my slow day. I don't see the connect between an optional HDD and a noisy DVD or BR drive.

Probably because there isn't one. I was talking about the optical drive only.

Two major things seem to be the cause of noise in optical drives - the drag created by the spinning disc, and vibrations caused by unbalance in said spinning disc. An optical disc is by harddrive standards very large in diameter. When it spins, the outer sections will therefore move at a proportionally larger linear velocity than a smaller diameter disc, thus creating more drag. This might be hard to silence, short of taking a lathe to the disc and cutting off the outmost third of it.

Vibrations are common with optical discs, seeing as they're cheaply produced out of plastic rather than precision-manufactured glass or aluminium like in HDDs, and at high speed the paint of the label printed on top is enough to cause unbalance. I'm sure some people have noticed a particular disc of theirs makes their entire PC chassis hum with resonance, but not others. With a 12x DVD drive, this will most likely happen with x360/PS3 also.

 

[inefficient]

What would the rotational rate on a 2x Bluray drive be like? I'm guessing it might be quieter?

IIRC, a DVD-ROM drive needs to spin 2.5x faster than a BluRay drive to achive the same transfer rates.

HD-DVD also need to spin a bit faster than BR drives to get a similar xfer rate. The denser the data is packed on the disk, the more you can read in just 1 rotation.

 

[Sis]

NOISE!

As in, a 12x optical drive makes a lot of it! They also tend to become very warm after a while, and at least in today's consoles, the disc is constantly spinning during gameplay so there might be an issue with the life on the spindle motor, and it'll also burn quite a bit of power as well by going full speed all the time.

I'd guess though that the disc will "idle" at some lower RPM while the drive isn't being accessed to save on wear and tear, noise and power tho, but what will it sound like while going full tilt?

Solid state all the way! Bring back the cartridges!

.Sis

 

[c0_re]

screw microsoft for not including a hdd standard, I almost wonder if they did it most ly to make modding much much more difficult.

 

[Guden Oden]

Um, they ARE including it as standard, if you pay another hundred bucks... So how could they try to limit modding when you can get it with a HDD when you walk out the store with it under your arm

 

[Bad_Boy]

i had a question though, dunno if any of you can answer this. more of an aesthetics question, but anyways...

what will the side of the core xbox's look without the hd detatchment? or will they still have the detatchment and it would be just the shell w/out the hd?

 

[PARANOiA]

Um, they ARE including it as standard, if you pay another hundred bucks... So how could they try to limit modding when you can get it with a HDD when you walk out the store with it under your arm

I only know a little about modding, but I think the XBox was much easier to mod because it had it's O/S on the HDD. If the HDD is optional in the new machine, the OS must be on the actual box/mobo/bios if I'm not mistaken. So I think it will likely make modding harder, unless this can be exploited in software (eg, buffer overflow such as the 'Splinter Cell' trick).

 

[Guden Oden]

Modding on the xbox typically means zapping the flashrom content or substituting it with a different flashrom (by soldering in a modchip). Old dashboard versions (the "os" stored on disk) were susceptible to various tricks, but any box bought past a certain date or connected up to xbox live (or played more recent game titles I would guess) have had patches applied to it to fix those gaps. You don't need to alter the harddrive contents at all to mod an xbox, really.