[SpookyZalost]

indeed, there's an SD card mod for the sega dreamcast from the same guys, they did that one first before the saturn one.
now I'm just waiting for somebody to make one for the sega CD addon to the genesis! 

there's also a usb drive mod for the PS1 but only the one's with the serial ports... though I hear there's a CD drive replacement in the works for it as well.

what it comes down to is any optical disc based console before 6th gen the only way to create backups of games and maintain the life of the console was to use burned discs and modchips... and that burns out the CD drive faster.

add to that the dreamcast and the gamecube which also have this problem and you have about a dozen or so that once their optical disc drives fail and there are no more replacement parts... they're done.

now the gamecube can be sidestepped because the nintendo wii can play gamecube games natively, at higher resolutions, and load from USB external hard drives>

it can be argued that PS2's that have the hardware to play PS1 games can do the same thing since the PS2 supports an internal hdd with the network periphial...

but where does that leave the saturn, the 3DO, the atari jaguar, etc?

that's why it's important that these ODE's are being made, because otherwise there will come a time when we can no longer play these old systems anymore.

and if you've ever tried to emulate the saturn you know it's really difficult to get it working.

plus there's a huge major advantage, and that's load time.

since the ODE reads it all as virtual data on a solid state storage medium there's no disc scanning looking for information like on optical discs.

they're also completely silent unlike the old optical disc drives.