How would you feel if the next Nintendo console used flash memory cards?

[Aielyn]

Eddie_Raja said:

Mystro-Sama said:

I think it would be excellent. They hold more than discs, read speaks are faster and I don't even use the bluray feature on my consoles. Not to mention the console would probably be smaller and lighter with a disc drive.

Fast Blue-Ray drives are actually about as fast as a standard USB 2.0.  To be be a lot faster and have a larger capacity they would have to be 128GB USB 3.0 - which cost $60+.  Not to mention the newest Blue Rays hold 130GB.

 

There is a reason Nintendo stopped using cartridges.

Erm... 3DS says hi. Also, the old style of cartridges were full circuit boards. New ones are basically flash memory.

Plus, you're talking about retail prices. And there's no need to actually use USB, since we're talking about cards and not USB keys. SD version 4 (UHS-II) gets speeds up to 4 times the current max speed of Blu-Ray drives, and that's for the standard formatting - you could get twice the data flow and twice the data storage by essentially having a card format that is kind of like two SD cards attached to each other (not that this is what I'm suggesting they'll use), kind of like having two Blu-Ray drives and two discs - you get twice the read speed due to parallelisation. They want fast read speeds, but don't need fast write speeds (or any writeability at all, for that matter). That likely provides a potential method for reducing cost, etc.

3DS cartridges go as high as 8 GB. Think about that - 8 GB cards, and yet 3DS game prices can be quite low. Perhaps someone here knows what their read speeds are? Not to mention write speeds (I know that Pokemon X/Y store pokemon data on the card, at least).