The age of irritating memory cards was abolished with the release of the original Xbox, however, it was not until the next generation of consoles with the Xbox 360 and PS3 that memory cards started to truly disappear. The Xbox 360 and PS3 feature internal hard drives with some serious capacity, upwards of 120 GB. Having this much storage allows these consoles to store music, videos, and applications. The Nintendo Wii also has a limited internal memory of 512 MB, which is enough to store data from games, but not enough for much else. However, the standard memory card from the PS2 was 8 MB, and was enough to store data from several games before reaching capacity, so even the Wii is suitable for avoiding memory cards.
Hard drives in the Xbox 360 and PS3 have improved over the last year, and now it’s possible to do an Xbox 360 or PS3 hard drive upgrade that can add a lot more storage to the console. The Xbox 360 and PS3 were designed to be video game consoles that also functioned as media devices, much like a standard PC. This sets these two consoles apart from the Wii, and provides them with a broader audience. In fact, it’s believed that the PS3 was a huge factor in determining Blu-Ray the winner between it and the Toshiba backed HD DVD format.
