Cartridges or optical discs?

[fatslob-:O]

SvennoJ said:

Perhaps the love for carts is a result of the frustration with lengthy installs and loading times from discs. Last gen ps3 had notoriously slow installs (mgs4 10 minutes for the next chapter) and while the ps4 has mostly fixed that, xbox one now suffers from slow installs.

That carts are faster was mostly the result of the games on them being much smaller. BotW still has plenty lengthy loading times and the WiiU even outperforms the Switch during the game. For best result carts will also need to be installed as the carts the games come on won't be the more expensive UHS-3 speed class, not the new video speed class. And even at 90 MB/s they only match sequential read speed of a 5400 rpm HDD, while next gen consoles really need to be targeting SSD through Sata 3 at 500 MB/s.

Eurogamer did a test
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-best-microsd-cards-for-switch-loading-time-comparison
Internal storage (fully installing the game) wins, while there is no point buying faster than UHS-1 cards as the Switch doesn't benefit from faster cards. Which means that cartridges sit well below UHS-1 speed class, meaning less than 40 MB/s read speed, less than half of a 5400 rpm hdd.

Yeah, I never quite understood the supposed speed advantages when it comes to cartridges. Now theoretically solid state technology are straight up faster in comparison to mechanical parts in terms of potential performance but I would not use that argument in favour of Nintendo systems when their cartridges have relatively shit slow read speeds in comparison to other common NAND flash memory or even disc drives for that matter ... (for Nintendo the most compelling advantage to them is obtaining a smaller form factor)

Solid state storage does have higher potential read/write speeds but that's also dependent on other qualities such as the quality of the flash memory itself and the interface speeds too ...

The only probably reason why Nintendo games maintains lower install times/faster loading times is because their games usually have a low storage memory/(I/O) bandwidth ratio ...