Nintendo has the answer to their little internal storage issue … use SD cards! When the system first launched, most people would have looked at this and felt it was short sided, ridiculous, or somehow too pricey to do. Leave it to time to take care of all of those things!
SD cards have become a dime a dozen, and they’re more than small enough that an end user would not mind stashing a couple in a case for their WiiWare or Virtual Console games. A check of my local Micro Center reveals a 1GB card at $6, and a 2GB card at $8, and they’re more than capable enough for the needs of the games Nintendo wants to put out there right now. Heck, the 2GB one might be too capable, just ask the people hacking the system to run backups.
The only thing that Nintendo could do to enhance it would be to update their firmware to have this support SDHC cards as well, something that will make the storage capability of the Wii limitless (and even could open up other publishing platforms). Deft programmers have created SDHC access for other devices, so I have to think the Wii firmware could add support for these. The cost point is even better too; that Micro Center has 8GB SDHC cards for $22.
So let me pose you a question … you can buy 100 DVD’s for about $30, or you can buy a 500 GB hard drive for about $60 to $65 … which one would you pick? In my mind, the decision is quickly changing over to using the hard drive.
The answer is simple … it comes from both a sense of space and time. I’ve always been an optical media addict, for a good 10 years now, and that means saving anything I find to a CD, or DVD, or something that’s fairly static. However, this doesn’t come without its own cost … time. Even at 16x speeds, it takes five minutes to burn a full DVD and maybe another five minutes to get that disc ready and organize stuff. So, six discs an hour … if you value your time at minimum wage, that’s $1 a disc!
So after about 30-50 discs, your possible return on investment over having a drive that holds 100 DVD’s worth of stuff and is dynamic and not “stuck” in place suddenly sounds plausibly good. You would also lose other possible negatives of disc media, like space lost when you can’t fill a disc, or sometimes questionable compatibility from drive to drive.
So, these now suddenly cheap hard drives, under 15 cents a GB, and quickly approaching a dime … are they the answer to everything? There is an argument to say no too. Optical media does have a nice convenience factor, and will always have a use when sharing media with friends, and when you need some space quick, a 4.7 GB disk beats waiting for a huge hard drive to show up. No USB ports needed, no extra cabling to haul with you. Organizing will also cost time here, so it would be unrealistic to think that the preparation time you assume would be saved with every disc is fully collected back.
But with all that in mind, I can see myself picking up one of these drives soon and testing out the theory of whether I do save the kind of time I think I could with going with hard drives. External drives are down to $70 from places like eCost.com (and even $90 from local sources), internal drives are sometimes cheaper than that from Geeks.com and Newegg.com … and if it seems unrealiztic to think I’d want to carry a 3.5″ hard drive enclosure on the road with me (which is a fair argument), dynamic flash media and portable hard drives are dramatically less than what they were (8GB Flash Drives for $25, 120GB portable drives for $60), so data portability is not a huge thing, and that doesn’t even include the cloud storage world!
So, what do you think? Are you compelled to give up on optical and go with hard drives more and more?
