XBox2 Hard Drive Rumors

[racketboy]

caught this on Gizmodo:

So apparently I got a sexy anonymous rumor yesterday morning, but Thunderbird's wonky spam filtering decided it could wait to be posted until today.

"Regarding the Xbox 2 hard drive, I was snowboarding in Whistler, B.C. from February 19 - 26, 2004. We were in a bar called the Amsterdam Cafe in the village one night and J. Allard, the head of Microsoft's Xbox division was in the bar with some friends. I recognized him from a recent Business 2.0 article and we started talking. (He bought my friends and I a round of drinks he called "Hey Zeuses" - they were Red Bull and tequila and they were nasty.) Anyway, we were talking about the Xbox 2 and he said their current plan was not to include a hard drive in the Xbox 2 itself, but to offer a portable hard drive as an accessory you could buy separately. Here's the kicker: He said what they were trying to do was to incorporate MP3 (and WMA, obviously) functionality into the portable hard drive and turn the thing into an iPod killer. Basically, the idea was to come up with an MP3 player that was as good or better than the iPod that would also serve as the hard drive for the Xbox 2. And he said they planned to sell them as a loss leader at $100 each. I don't know how you can confirm this other than if someone happens to know that J. Allard was in fact in Whistler that week or is fond of a Red Bull and tequila drink he calls "Hey Zeus," but for what it's worth that is what he told me. (He also told me that the Xbox 2 will in fact use an IBM processor, but I think that is already pretty widely known.)"

Hrm, that's a rough one. An integrated iPod-esque hard drive would be a nice two-birds-with-one-stone move if Microsoft had the huevos to pull it off, but why is J. Allard getting lit and blabbing secrets to snowboarders?

 

[schi0249]

That is a real cool concept. The iPod itself can be used as an external hard drive, so i imagine MS could make something similar. There have been rumors for awhile that MS was working on an iPod killer. But i find the story hard to believe. Working for a corporation, I know how seriously directors take secret projects. The ones I have been around won't say a word until it is public info.

 

[ExCyber]

Even if you don't take the "iPod-killer" story seriously, it's worth noting that:

- The hard drive is probably the second most failure-prone component in the Xbox (after the DVD reader, which sees much more use)

- There's generally a much bigger profit margin in accessories than consoles (think 5-10x markup)

- Flash memory is getting denser and cheaper all the time, making it questionable whether or not a hard drive has any tangible benefit over memory cards in the first place

Personally, I didn't see the hard drive as much of an advantage in the first place.

 

[it290]

I thought it was pretty much already known that the Xbox2 was not going to ship with a HD.

 

[Curtis]

You wouldn't believe the fervour with which the Australian Xbox "fans" at Xbox World demand a HD in the Xbox2. I've tried using similar arguements to no avail.

On top of reliability and cost, you've also got noise and heat to deal with. Personally I think the Xbox 2 would be better served with a half a gig of internal flash memory.

 

[Pearl Jammzz]

no hdd = harder to store all your XBox games....like homebrew stuff, emulators and such.

 

[Curtis]

And MS would care about this because...?

 

[Pearl Jammzz]

they wouldn't, but I do. haha. Oh well, I am sure they will make a way....and by that time, dvd-r should be a lot cheaper....

 

[Alexvrb]

Originally posted by Curtis@Apr 10, 2004 @ 12:36 AM

On top of reliability and cost, you've also got noise and heat to deal with. Personally I think the Xbox 2 would be better served with a half a gig of internal flash memory.

Noise and heat aren't really issues anymore unless you're trying to shove a highend drive in it. A decent 5400 RPM drive these days can offer reasonable transfer rates, while being quiet and cool. You don't need anything faster, as it is still much faster than a DVD drive. Which brings up one problem with using flash, the lack of swap space. However, it won't matter if they have a good DVD drive and lots of RAM. The cost and reliability issues are a big deal, though.

So really, internal flash would work fine, and they already paired up with that one flash company, I think M-systems? Not their high-end super-expensive stuff, but they are going to use something from them. You could no longer use it for swap, so I hope they plan on cramming in a good amount of RAM. Having the ability to use external flash cards and *possibly* an iPod-like device in addition to internal memory would be good. MS isn't stupid, I'm sure they have things planned out.

Oh yes, and they will also potentially be able to make use of online storage for some things, like saving characters, etc. It seems like a no-brainer for online PC games, but not so for consoles.

 

[ExCyber]

Which brings up one problem with using flash, the lack of swap space.

You only need writable swap space for stuff that your program modifies, generates, decompresses, etc.; there's no law that says that you can't mmap chunks off of a DVD.

 

[Alexvrb]

Originally posted by ExCyber@Apr 11, 2004 @ 02:32 PM

Which brings up one problem with using flash, the lack of swap space.

You only need writable swap space for stuff that your program modifies, generates, decompresses, etc.; there's no law that says that you can't mmap chunks off of a DVD.

I understand that, and it was moderated by the sentence directly following it. I am just pointing out that HD swap *is* fairly fast compared and flexible compared to streaming from optical media, and if they don't have a HD, it may be beneficial to include a fast DVD drive and a good amount of memory. Which again, I am sure they will do.

 

[Dyne]

Originally posted by ExCyber@Apr 9, 2004 @ 06:43 PM

Personally, I didn't see the hard drive as much of an advantage in the first place.

had the developers that pined for it in the first place actually used it as it was supposed to be used (to cache the data to emilinate loading times, increase draw distance et cet.) you would know the advantage. as it stands those same assholes that wanted it, programmed for the lowest common denominator (ps2) and ALWAYS scrapped caching the data making it useless besides custom soundtracks.

 

[ExCyber]

I thought it had some potential, but not enough to justify it being there. I imagined e.g. RPGs with huge persistent worlds, large-scale action games with deformable terrain and destructible buildings that would stay the way you left them, etc. However, I think the problem wasn't that the space wasn't there on other consoles, it's that nobody seriously knew how to do it or wanted to do it bad enough to figure out how. It was a kind of "wouldn't it be cool if" scenario, and in practice the HD just became a big, noisy, non-removable memory card.