Thursday, August 30, 2012

the death of optical media


here's something that people aren't noticing as much: the slow removal of optical media from newer PCs, laptops, etc. with USB flash drives and SD cards getting faster and more spacious, as well as smaller in form factor people are using the USB flash drive more than they are the CD or DVD or even Blu-Ray for media storage and transfer. the thing is NAND flash memory is faster than Disc based media and i find optical media less reliable than solid-state memory formats. i hate all the modern consoles being disc-based, the discs are easier to damage and break than the carts for my N64, SNES or NES. i get new Wii games from my library all the time and some of them are scratched beyond playability, some will go into the menu, some will play a certain length into the game and freeze, some the Wii can read the game partially, but fail to boot up past the warning screen, and then some it can't even recognize as Wii games. that wouldn't happen if they still used cartridge based media for the games. they could fit more on them, they'd last longer and they'd be faster than any super-mega-ultra-super-high-speed Blu-Ray drive could EVER be. my reasoning behind supporting cartridge based consoles is that mechanical systems become more and more pointless as NAND Flash becomes faster and cheaper. no matter how fast they make the discs spin the motors and gears in the drives will keep on breaking down faster and faster as they put more wear and tear on a drive that could just be simple pin connectors. so, with all these homebrew mods that remove the use of disc drives and allow you to use flash drives, external hard drives, and SD cards to boot games and the digital download games, as well as the ability to copy Xbox 360 games onto the hard-drives, etc. discs become more and more pointless to the companies and the players. they're leaning towards a more cart-based medium for PCs with flash-drives and SD cards, external hard-drives and hot-swap SATA bays. USB slots are replacing optical drives on some new Mac laptops and most Chrome based PCs. with the power-users replacing their optical drives with extra SSDs and USB slots and the average consumer using flash-drives for portable storage and cam-corders that use SD cards the death of optical media is imminent. i can only say it's about time they got rid of it, I've been fed-up with scratched discs for 11 years now!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Translate