USB 3.0 Flash Drive - The Future?

[Maskot]

I was just thinking, in the future when USB 3.0 is even faster, would it be possibly to put high quality nand flash that's all about speed on a flash drive, say 16GB at a time, and then install the game onto the flash drive, then when you want to play a game, you just insert the flash drive with the game on it, and then start it up with extremely low load times.  I think this has a future for console gaming as well, back to the old "cartridge"

[Eric1024]

I think there are a few problems with that:

 

1. No one wants to have dozens of flash drives sitting around - you'd loose track of them

2. No OEM wants to spend the money to put the highest binned nand into flash drives, that's what external SSDs are for.

3. USB is still a terrible interface for anything but file transfers. Random performance over USB 3 is terrible compared to sata 3. Sure we can always say that "it will be better in the future," but by then flash controllers will be good enough to outpace whatever that USB standard in random performance.

 

I think a better option would be to have a single large flash drive or external SSD with lots of games on it, and to use eSATA instead of USB3

[WoodenMarker]

I doubt this faster connection would still be called usb 3.0