Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PS3 - A Hardware Discussion

Storage Devices

Both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 feature removable 2.5” HDDs as an option for storage; the difference being that the PS3 won’t ship with a hard drive, while the Xbox 360 will. 

In the original Xbox, developers used the hard drive to cache game data in order to decrease load times and improve responsiveness of games.  Compared to the built in 5X CAV DVD drive in the Xbox, the hard drive offered much faster performance.  With the Xbox 360, the performance demands on the hard drive are lessened, the console now ships with a 12X CAV DVD-DL drive.  You can expect read performance to more than double over the first DVD drive that shipped with the original Xbox, which obviously decreases the need for a hard drive in the system (but definitely doesn’t eliminate it).

This time around, Microsoft has outfitted the 360 with a 20GB removable 2.5” HDD, but its role is slightly different.  While developers will still be able to use the drive to cache data if necessary, its role in the system will be more of a storage device for downloaded content.  Microsoft is very serious about their Xbox Live push with this next console generation, and they fully expect users to download demos, game content updates and much more to their removable hard drive.  The fact that it’s removable means that users can carry it around with them to friends’ houses to play their content on other 360s. 

It is important to note that disc capacity remains unchanged from the original Xbox, the 360 will still only have a maximum capacity of 9GB per disc.  Given that the current Xbox titles generally use less than half of this capacity, there’s still some room for growth.

Microsoft has also reduced the size of the data that is required to be on each disc by a few hundred megabytes, combine that with the fact that larger game data can be compressed further thanks to more powerful hardware and game developers shouldn’t run into capacity limitations on Xbox 360 discs anytime soon. 

The PS3 is a bit more forward looking in its storage devices, unfortunately as of now it will not ship with a hard drive.  The optical drive of choice in the PS3 will be a Blu-ray player, which originally looked quite promising but now is not as big of a feature as it once was. 

The two main competitors for the DVD video successor are the HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards.  Around the announcement of the PS3 at E3, there was a lot of discussion going on surrounding an attempt to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards, which would obviously make the PS3 Blu-ray support a huge selling feature.  It would mean that next year you would be able to buy a console, generally estimated to be priced around the $400 mark, that could double as a HD-DVD/Blu-ray player.  Given that standalone HD-DVD/Blu-ray players are expected to be priced no less than $500, it would definitely increase the adoption rate of the PS3.  However, talks between unifying the two standards appear to have broken down without any hope for resolution meaning that there will be two competing standards for the next-generation DVD format.  As such, until unified HD-DVD/Blu-ray players are produced, the PS3 won’t have as big of an advantage in this regard as once thought.  It may, however, tilt the balance in favor of Blu-ray as the appropriate next-generation disc standard if enough units are sold. 

When we first disassembled the original Xbox, we noticed that it basically featured a PC DVD drive.  From what we can tell, the Xbox 360 will also use a fairly standard dual layer DVD drive.  As such, it would not be totally unfeasible for Microsoft to, later on, outfit the Xbox 360 with a HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive, once a true standard is agreed upon. 

The one advantage that Sony does have is that developers can use BD-ROM (Blu-ray) discs for their games, while if MS introduces Blu-ray or HD-DVD support later on it will be strictly as a video player (game developers won’t offer content for only owners of Blu-ray/HD-DVD Xbox 360 versions).  The advantage is quite tangible in that PS3 developers will be able to store a minimum of 23.3GB of data on a single disc, which could mean that they could use uncompressed video and game content, freeing up the CPU to handle other tasks instead of dealing with decompression on the fly.  Of course, Blu-ray media will cost more than standard DVD discs, but over the life of the PS3 that cost will go down as production increases.