Quote:Top loading has fewer moving parts, but slot loading is still less prone to failure than front tray loading drives. That's been shown many times (and from my personal experience, tray loading mechanisms fail a LOT).

I prefer front loading simply due to it looking like "the future" compared to any other method (even though it's closest to how old floppy disks were loaded). It's what the XBox One uses now too, so pretty much everyone has switched to it at this point (including Apple). The most important thing in a front loading design is an emergency eject, which sadly none of the consoles (or Apple computers) bother with. That's just my personal taste though. I can see how one might prefer the Playstation 1 design.

Quote:Your list of games is sub optimal. I see a few good ones, but a lot of bad ones (Lair?).

Quote:Kingdom Hearts - I know you like anime, and if you're an American you like Disney, so this one's really a no brainer. The Final Fantasy references are pretty thin on the ground, so you really don't need to have any familiarity with that series to enjoy this one. Pick up the two HD collections and see for yourself. They are basically beat 'em ups, closer to something like God of War or Devil May Cry than to an RPG of any sort, but enjoyable. I mean c'mon, don't you want to pal around with a big blue genie while beating up pirates? Maybe beat back a monster invasion alongside Scrooge McDuck, Stitch, and Tron? Yeah, you do.

Quote:closer to something like God of War or Devil May Cry than to an RPG of any sort,

Quote: Shoulder button for attack works very well I've found, because it frees up your thumbs for other things. Jumping can be a bit tricky, but other than that, I haven't had too many issues with that game's controls.

Quote: The PS3 store sucks now, but it didn't used to be so bad, I mean at least it was stable. The issue is when they made the PS4, they back-ported the store interface to the PS3, and the PS3 can barely handle that code. Yes, I've found it crashing pretty often too, on top of being choppy.

Quote: The download speeds are decent, but are slower than most western company's servers tend to be. That's true, but from your complaint I'd say the main issue is your use of wifi. Here's a quick and dirty fix, just unhook the ethernet cord from your 360 and hook it up to your PS3 when you're using it. A slightly more involved fix would be getting a Netgear switch (5 port and 8 port are pretty affordable) which supports full gig speed on each port. Go for the "unmanaged" versions, since "management" isn't needed at all in your situation and in fact adds a few microseconds of latency. Then you'll never need to move those cords again.

Quote: The "single save location at a time" is pretty odd, but that internal flash was added pretty late in to only the latest revisions. I wouldn't consider that "worst of all" since you should be relying on the hard drive anyway. It's a waste of perfectly good storage, but not by much. I shoved a 500GB hard drive in my original version PS3 years ago, and it's done me well so far. Ultimately, I'd love to replace it with a flash based drive when the prices drop enough to justify it, but the built-in flash in the later models is just too puny to make any good use of, so I don't miss it.

Quote:Certain revisions of the 360 also have some built in flash (8 GB), and when I updated my model a few years ago I found myself more annoyed by the option to pick where to save than anything, since it pops up that XBox interface every single time I try to save any game and then I pick exactly the same location I ALWAYS pick for literally every game. The option is nice, but not when it becomes an annoyance. Perhaps if I could (like in Windows) check a box on that interface to "never ask me this again", I'd be okay with it.

Quote:Do I agree with you about wired internet being faster? Well, I mean it's not even up for discussion. The specs are easily available and it's simply a fact. Even AC, at it's highest theoretical speed, reaches only 780 Mb a second, vs ethernet's 1 Gb (that's the standard right now, although 10 Gb does exist, it hasn't really been widely accepted yet). AD does allow up to 6 Gb, but it can't go through average walls very easily, if at all, and isn't a good replacement for AC. In practice, most devices still use either N or even G, and so they don't even approach the 1 Gb speeds. Most modern routers have a combination of either N or maybe AC and multiple gig ports. Almost nothing these days still uses a 100 Mb ethernet port (the Wii and Wii U are exceptions, but those devices also use G instead of AC, and G is still slower than 100 Mb connections).

That's not even the half of it. Even if AD were a good fit (as in a large open office space with few to no walls), there's the matter of reliability. Wireless simply isn't as reliable as a solid wired connection, and it likely never will be. There's just too many variables in a wireless connection which are all absent from a wired connection. There's also the matter of latency, and between SSID and security negotiating as well as the aforementioned reliability issues, all but those locations almost next to the access point are going to show both latency and speeds lower than the device's listed maximum.

That's not to mention basic security, as a wired connection won't have people listening in like a wifi connection can (even if secured, that data is still going over the air where a cable wouldn't).

Quote:This whole time I've badmouthed wifi quit a bit, but I do want to be clear that it has one overwhelming advantage, and that's for portable devices.

Quote: I do have the first model PS3 (with the PS2 chipset and everything), and it does have those flash memory ports. I even tossed a few old unused memory cards of each type in those slots just because I wasn't using them for anything else. In short, the memory isn't locked off when a hard drive is installed (to be clear, all but the latest cheapest model PS3 had a hard drive installed out of the box), but games can't actually "see" those cards. While you can store saved game files on any of them, it would be pretty inconvenient as you'd need to move it back to the hard drive for the game to do anything with it. Further, unlike the model you have, if the hard drive is removed entirely then the system won't even boot up correctly, since so much of the OS is stored on the hard drive. That internal flash was put in your model purely as a way to allow them the possibility of selling the system without a hard drive.

Quote: I've got the S revision, and you're right, it was 4 GB rather than 8 GB. For my part, the moment the 360 was updated with the option, I usually installed any game I was playing entirely to the hard drive anyway, just to avoid load times. The flash memory would of course reduce them further. One big issue with the 360 is the lack of official support for using whatever hard drive you want. That's one area where Sony comes out ahead, at least. With the PS3, if you want to store your games in flash, you can buy an internal flash hard drive. They've got some pretty nice ones now, though the cost per gig is going to be higher so a 1 TB drive is going to be out of your price range I'd imagine.

Quote:Technically, one can do that with the 360, but MS sure makes it hard. For one, special 3rd party formatting programs will be needed, and for two there's that really annoying drive bay that is shaped to only really fit MS's own proprietary drives. While other SATA drives CAN fit, they sit pretty loose and could come unplugged pretty easily. One could cut open the little black box MS's drives come in and swap in their own drive into that box to solve that problem, but it's rather annoying that MS makes people hop through all those hoops. Well, there's always just using a USB flash drive.

Quote:USB 2.0 is technically faster than the SATA connection used internally on the 360, but in practice most USB 2 ports don't actually come close to that maximum so a SATA connection still ends up a bit more reliably fast in the long run.

Quote: We've talked about the whole "gives you cancer" wifi fears before, but I really want to reiterate that simply saying "we don't have all the science in" (no matter how often and how many tests come back showing that no, once again, wifi doesn't appear to cause any illness) is not a good attitude. This is something I've seen a lot in a very certain wing of liberals (and, frankly, a very certain similarly minded set of conservatives around here in Oklahoma, where you can find a chiropractic clinic for every church). Certain liberal minded people will claim to be pro-science on issues of climate change and evolution, but go totally fringe when it comes to their thoughts on psychiatric medication or vaccines. The science completely disproves their fears on the later, but they dismiss that with arguments absolutely IDENTICAL to arguments people against climate change or evolution use to dismiss the scientific consensus on those topics. Fears on the dangers of cell phone radiation, to me, are no different than fears about vaccines. It's kinda beyond the scope of a thread on buying a PS3, but if you want my opinion, I don't think there's anything to worry about, nor do I think there's some major gap in knowledge that needs to be filled before reaching that conclusion.

Quote: USB 1.0/1.1 was designed without file transfer in mind. My own keyboard dates from that time period and is a 1.1 device (I just recently cleaned the entire thing in and out, and it sure needed it). For keyboards and mice, the speed of 1.1 far exceeds anyone's use case (by the time you're typing fast enough for it to be an issue, you've probably already set your keyboard on fire). USB 2.0 came later when they realized just how important file transfer would be for the spec. USB 3.0 and 3.1 are great, but I've been rather disappointed to see how slowly a number of devices have been to adopt it. Are there even any web cams that use 3.0 yet? I mean, with 4KHD and 120 Htz, it sure would be useful at this point to handle all that data in a fast manner, perhaps without compression.

Quote: If you're curious, flash drives are crazy fast compared to hard discs. In fact, on most PCs (including my own), the biggest modern bottleneck is the hard disk speed. I do ultimately intend to replace my 4TB drive with a flash drive (it'll be a much more convenient setup if I can just move over a partition than if I had to reinstall Windows completely just to set up a Windows partition on a much smaller flash drive). Right now, 4TB drives cost about as much as a cheap car. So, I'm waiting a few years for prices to become more reasonable. Hopefully I won't fill up this drive before then . Eh, who am I kidding? Games these days take up like 50GB each. I'll have it full by the end of next year.

Quote: Oh, you were asking about why your model PS3 doesn't even let you "see" the flash once you've got the hard drive installed. I think I covered this above, but here's my take on it. I think it was simple lazy coding and a lazy workaround. As I said, the OS is partially installed on the system's hard drive. The OS also makes the assumption there is only one hard drive. Your model is likely set up so that, in order to prevent confusing the OS, "hides" the "flash" hard drive when another is physically installed. That way, the OS never tries to install updates to the wrong area. They may also have it set up so that this flash partition still has that OS data, so when the added hard drive is removed, it can still boot back to that flash partition in a pinch. Contrast that with how the OS handles devices plugged into either the memory card ports on my model or through a USB port. Those are never used to boot the system in any situation, not even an emergency like if the hard drive is removed, so there's never any chance the OS could get confused (they would also be "flagged" internally in very different ways). Lazy, yes, but I think that's what they likely decided on.