Could Flash Drives And Cartriges Be Better Than Disks?

[Aghanim]

There's something a bit more satisfying about using a disc over a flash drive. And if it's a bit cheaper, all the better. I don't consider it too important to me though, and I'm content with either form of physical storage.

However:

I absolutely DETEST the move towards cloud storage. Not just because of the potential DRM (which will be bypassed somehow), not just because of subscriptions (which also will be bypassed), but because NOT EVERYONE HAS A GIGABIT CONNECTION. I get charged $130/month for half a megabyte per second peak download speeds, and it's down about 2-3 times a week for an hour or so at a time. This makes it the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable connection available. Most games on my Steam account have never been played because I haven't the opportunity to download 10 GB monstrosities. I have never been able to stream anything live above 480p quality. A lot of people in the world have far worse connections than me. How the hell are we supposed to function in a world that keeps everything online? For me, it is still far faster to drive twenty minutes to the store, buy a movie, and drive home than it would be to download it. Even if DRM is bypassed, and subscriptions averted through piracy or similar means, these products will still be inaccessible to me.

The entertainment industry is worried about losing profit from a more expensive storage format? Maybe they should look into the profit they're losing from potential customers who WANT to spend money on the products, and have the money to spend, but can't because of the storage format.

Agreed. Wait what? 130/month for 500 kB? or kb? If its a flat rate you could do overnight downloading like I am, I have downloaded over 10 GB games through 1.5 mbps connection, sure its slow but overnight download make it doesn't matter at all, except electricity costs, which makes me agree with you, unless in some future steam games could be downloaded through a raspberry pi

[Kryten]

He might be unlucky enough to have to use a satellite connection; there are quite large (although very sparsely populated) areas in the US where the only real choices are that and dial-up.

[Skyler4856]

CD's are too fragile and aren't mobile enough. The flash drive is compact and can fit into my pocket

[Nuke]

he said half a megabyte, 500kB, which is 4 megabit. i had a similar connection it was tolerable, 4 mbit and a 40 gig cap, costs like $99. im old enough to remember the horrors of 56k internet, so its still a rocket in my book. few months ago i switched up to a 12 megabyte connection with a 60 gig cap for half of what i was paying before. im pretty rural too. i really dont want the cloud to take over all the things, but the connections are always getting better, so by the time that it does our connections will be much faster.

[Maxwell Comp]

You forgot the lowest-cost storage medium, and it's one that is still common in many industries:tape storage.

Yep, old-fashioned tape drives. Modern tape cartridges can hold up to 4TB on a single cartridge, and are often the most cost-effective form of long-term storage for massive amounts of data.

[Nuke]

yea but thats more of a backup format. also magnetic tape is made of plastics and therefore will degrade with time. corporate backups are usually stored in climate controlled vaults. tapes stored in household conditions rarely last a decade (like all my black sabbath tapes that i stole from my brother). so its not really for the consumer.

Edited January 4, 2014 by Nuke