Thanks to a couple of comments (who knows where they found the article, maybe the wonders of Twitter, where I can be followed?), I was reminded of the article I posted back in October noting that Nintendo had maybe backed right into the best storage medium for their Wii system, the SD card slot, and if they made it SDHC compatible, it could truly be something that would supplant the need for a dedicated hard drive, without adding bulk.
So, imagine my interest in reading on CrunchGear that Nintendo may be working on a USB Hard Drive. There would be only one way I would like this idea over SDHC (we’ll get to that in a minute), but really, as a first reaction, why not just enhance the functionaly of the SD slot?
The one commenter on the CrunchGear post may have hit the reason for that. Nintendo may not want it to be an open format that can be competitive, they’d rather make their own thing that they could charge far more for in 32GB and 64GB portions. I sincerely hope they don’t plan to do it with the pictured flash drive in the CG post! Couple of reasons for that:
- Unless it’s a super small form factor, it would add a lot of bulk to the back of the case. Not that Nintendo cares, but there’s no good reason to ruin good cases and system setups by changing the form factor of the system, even a little bit.
- A USB drive isn’t going to offer any serious performance enhancements over a SDHC card, random writes will still be painfully slow in either case.
- If it’s a USB drive, expecting it to somehow stay “proprietary” isn’t realistic. Give hackers three days with that thing, and you’ll be able to roll with your own USB drive in a Wii, that’s a promise.
SDHC cards are up to 32GB, they’re not horribly expensive (under $100, and even around $40 for a 16GB one), and with the way the Wii has built up to this point, it’s hard to imagine, even in a world of streaming and video downloads, that a Wii would need more than 16 gigs on board.
So what would the exception to this be? A true solid state hard drive. Even a basic core model of these drives would offer extremely fast read and write times, and as long as they avoid the JMicron chipset that has befallen some of the cheaper models (or pair them like the OCZ Apex does to offset the stutter problem), they could put a device together which would blow away even the DVD drive in access speeds, and provide one great experience and relief to load times.
I would also offer the argument that if Nintendo wants to secure these drives and prevent piracy through some method, such as hardware or software based encryption, the solid state would be the way to go, such operations would incude too many random writes and performance would suffer on flash media of lesser quality. Nintendo would be heroic if they offered this strictly as a software encryption method, and left the hardware side open for people to tweak with, but I think that is going to be asking a bit much.
We’ll see in a few months what they come up with. If it’s a full fledged SSD that doesn’t break the bank, I’ll line up to get one. If it’s just a glorified SanDisk flash drive, then I’ll just yawn and move on with my life and go back to enjoying the Homebrew Channel some more.
