| Xen said: Carts will almost always be faster than a HDD. No moving parts, just a stream of electrons :) |
That's no universal truth. Most SSDs are faster than HDDs, but most memory cards and USB sticks are slower than HDDs. There is a wide range of speed differences for flash memory, depending on the memory itself and the interface.
F.e. some bigger Vita games had some serious loading times. Depending on the data (a few big files or many small files) and the different memory cards, the digital versions of Vita games could transfer 4 - 8 MB/s: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-how-fast-are-vita-memory-cards
And loading the data from retail cartridges of Vita games was even a bit slower: https://www.reddit.com/r/vita/comments/1wwtq5/ps_vita_game_cartridge_vs_memory_card_speed_test/
The eMMC flash memory of the Wii U also had no speed advantages compared to loading times of an external HDD and there were also WiiU games with annoying loading times.
And the main reason that the loading times of DS games and most 3DS games were no problem is the smaller size of these games... less data to read.
So we will have to wait and see, how fast the loading times of the Switch are and if Nintendo opted for lower costs or for performance.
