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What storage mediums are available?
With the need for more data and information to be saved as technologies have advanced, gaming consoles and systems need to have build in or external storage mediums to allow the ability to save and store work. This means that as games become more larger & the ability to save progress for a game is included, it allows for uses to save their progress on storage mediums provided within the console/system. Data can be very consuming when it needs to be stored in mass amount so large storage mediums need to be provided with consoles & systems.
I shall be looking at the storage mediums that consoles and systems use such as the Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3, looking at their types and speed compared to other on the market.
How do discs work?
Discs allow images and items to be burnt onto them for use in other devices such as a DVD player or CD Player. Images can be made from anything, this could be a music, a Video file such as a WAV, MP4 or MPEG or it could be images which want to be slide showed. Files are burnt onto the disc which then allows the device to read them and output whats on them, so if you were to burn a video onto a DVD and then play it in a DVD player, the film will start to play when its loaded. This is how games work when they have been created, an image of the files is made into an ISO and then this is burnt onto a disc for use when put into a console. The consoles disc drive reads the content & allows the user to interact with the features.
Mediums used in gaming?
For games and console to work they need to be stored on a disc, as the idea of downloading games has only become a new thing, for decades they have been stored on discs meaning that DVD's & optical discs would need to have been used to burn the ISO image of the game onto the disc and then these could be used to run the game. However, as DVD's have a maximum storage of 5.7 GB, this means that games couldn't exceed this amount unless they were multi-disc games. As console could only use such DVD's for their games to run from, they were limited to only 5.7 GB of space meaning that large expansive games would need to be slimmed down to fit on the disc.
However, PlayStation 3 made the decision of using a Blu-Ray player built into the console, which meant that they could handle masses extra of data information as the disc had 4 layers which could hold 25 GB of data per layer meaning that large expansive games wouldn't need to be compressed or slimmed down, they could be burnt straight across without a problem. Xbox 360 however lacked the support of Blu-Ray meaning that they could only have DVD's which meant games like Skyrim, Fallout & GTA would need to have some elements downgraded, which would mean less detail for graphics and or gameplay where missions & extras would need to be filtered out and removed altogether.
However even though the aspect of using discs to play games has been a successful move, the advancement to allowing users to download games directly to a HDD has been a common technology for a few years where players can now download games directly from the makers and play them through the Hard Drive, this has several more benefits. As the games can be downloaded the need to use discs is irrelevant, cutting the cost for manufacturers to produce and burn them. It also means that the download can be done from home or from a location where they don't need to go to a shop, they can simply purchase and then download the game directly there and then, which is quicker and more efficient as only Hard Drive space is needed. This method is also more beneficially for gaming systems as they won't need to use as much power due to them running the game from the HDD, this means that the system can run quicker & cooler as HDD is faster than a disc drive.
Anti-Piracy & how this has affected gaming?
Since the dawn of gaming, piracy has been a huge issue with gaming as the ability to clone and steal games has been a simple to do & used worldwide to gain access to games for a extremely cheap price. However in some newer models of consoles, the ability to block these types of games has been developed and implemented into such consoles as the Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3, where they have a chip which stops the use of pirate games to be played, blocking them from being loaded & alerting the user. This means that if an illegal game is played they are warned about it, and in some cases and message can be sent to Microsoft/Sony about they're usage of the game.The games are created the same way with them stored on discs and played just the same however they don't contain the same files & encoding meaning that the console can sweep these out as pirated copies.
Other types of media Storage:
For other consoles such as the PlayStation Portable a different type of disc was created called the Universal Media Disc which is a about a quarter the size of a DVD. These were designed to fit and suit the PSP and other handhelds like the PS vita, with them capable of holding 2 layers of 900MB meaning a final 1.8 GB of data can be stored on to them which a game can be burnt onto, these have the same limitation as the Xbox with them not having a large storage capacity meaning that they cannot hold large and extensive games, the games need to be compressed down and miss out on some content.
