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future of storage media

C

chipy

Golden Member
hey all

i was just thinking back to the days of nintendo where we plugged cartridges into the system instead of loading cds like we do with PS2 and such. It was much faster. However over the years games, music, movies have all turned to cds and dvds which tend to be slower at accessing the data. does anyone besides me think that the future of storage devices for data and multimedia(music, movies) would be solid-state devices which don't have any moving parts?
 
I think current solid state has a limited life, much more limited than CD's/DVD's, but I'm not 100& sure.

The big reason for moving to discs is because of one reason alone, money.
A 512MB solid state card is a heck of a lot more than a CD, and has slightly less capacity.

The maximum size of solid state media, I think, is about 2GB currently, while DVD's can hold 9GB, and BlueRay discs will be something like 27GB.
So capacity/cost is probably a major factor in using optical media.

In the future, if we find some way of making high speed, reliable, high capaciy, cheap solid state media, we may use it instead of optical, but there's a way to go until we get there.

USB flash drive speeds/access time
899KB/s is the fastest speed for USB flash drives, which are solid state. That's a speed of 6x in terms of CD speeds. Access times of solid state media is pretty excellent though.
 
Kind of hard to compare, you have to think about how much data those games really required back then, with low res graphics and midi music. The games on DVD are putting up near photo quality graphics with sometimes dolby surround sound. It may just be that current CD/DVD media are actually transferring more data per second than any of those cartridges were, but those carts just seemed faster because so little data was needed. I doubt there were any real data gathered on data throughput on those cartridges, so no real numbers to look at to compare....
 
I completely agree with you Lonyo. I noticed that SSD have limited capacity now, though I didn't know about their limited shelf-life. I hope we will be able to make them much more cheaply and to a greater scale. BTW, I've never heard of BlueRay discs... I'll have to look into that.

thanx
 
BlueRay is out in Japan already, we just have to wait for it to expand into other markets, hopefully sometime soon.
 
I don't think game consoles are going back to solid state any time soon. Heck, one of the reasons the Nintendo N64 was such a failure was because its catridges cost so much more to manufacture and held so much less data compared to Sony's at then groundbreaking idea of going to cd media.
 
Originally posted by: vegetation
I don't think game consoles are going back to solid state any time soon. Heck, one of the reasons the Nintendo N64 was such a failure was because its catridges cost so much more to manufacture and held so much less data compared to Sony's at then groundbreaking idea of going to cd media.
Click to expand...

PS1 wasn't ground breaking in it's use of CDs. Sega CD was around before then.
 
Originally posted by: DSE
Kind of hard to compare, you have to think about how much data those games really required back then, with low res graphics and midi music. The games on DVD are putting up near photo quality graphics with sometimes dolby surround sound. It may just be that current CD/DVD media are actually transferring more data per second than any of those cartridges were, but those carts just seemed faster because so little data was needed. I doubt there were any real data gathered on data throughput on those cartridges, so no real numbers to look at to compare....
Click to expand...

Yeah, the entire game is like ~2MB or less; I've seen the Bubsy ROM for SNES, and it's about 2MB. Much less data to store; plus, it seems like some of those games used assembly language of some kind - Gradius III ROM is only 513MB, which includes low-res graphics, midi-style music, a few speech clips, and some text.


Originally posted by: Lonyo
I think current solid state has a limited life, much more limited than CD's/DVD's, but I'm not 100& sure.

The big reason for moving to discs is because of one reason alone, money.
A 512MB solid state card is a heck of a lot more than a CD, and has slightly less capacity.

The maximum size of solid state media, I think, is about 2GB currently, while DVD's can hold 9GB, and BlueRay discs will be something like 27GB.
So capacity/cost is probably a major factor in using optical media.

In the future, if we find some way of making high speed, reliable, high capaciy, cheap solid state media, we may use it instead of optical, but there's a way to go until we get there.

USB flash drive speeds/access time
899KB/s is the fastest speed for USB flash drives, which are solid state. That's a speed of 6x in terms of CD speeds. Access times of solid state media is pretty excellent though.
Click to expand...

USB transfer speeds like that? Maybe for USB 1.1. I have this drive, and I just wrote a 232,540,160 byte file to it in 49 seconds, which is about 4.525MB/sec. Considering that USB 2.0's spec'd speed is 480Mbit/sec (60MB/sec), this is still a good bit slower, but it is definitely faster than USB 1.1 would be.
That test was done with the drive plugged into the USB cable that comes with the drive.
 
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