By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Soundwave on 06 September 2023
Edit Thread
Bofferbrauer2 said:
Soundwave said:

Sure you can get a junk Micro SD Card for $50 with a lot of storage, but that's going to be a crap 100-170MB/sec card that's slow as molasses. Just like you can get an old regular fat HDD with 4TB and declare yourself a genius because you have way more storage than the NVMe drives Sony and MS sell for the PS5/XSX. There's just one problem, your drive is a turtle by comparison. 

Nintendo could easily get UFS 3.0 or 3.1 speed internal flash storage, which can have up to 2100MB/sec read speed, it will blow any SD Card out of the water. And UFS 3.0 isn't some magical new or exotic technology, it's just the standard flash memory that's in hundreds of millions of Android phones and tablets already. And UFS 3.0 is the *old* standard from 2018, the new Android devices use UFS 4.0 which is double the speed, so Nintendo would likely be getting the 3.0/3.1 dated version for a laugher of a cost. 

If Nintendo were to offer it, I think plenty of people would rather pay the extra $50 and have the higher speed internal storage. Relative to what you pay to go up in storage for say an iPhone or iPad, getting double or quadruple (lol) the amount of high speed internal storage that's way faster than an SD Card for only $50 more is not bad at all. Also a lot of those cheap SD Cards have high failure rates and don't actually even hit the low end speed they claim, seen plenty of "150MB/sec cards" Micro SD cards that when tested are only reading at 80MB/sec if you're lucky ... you get what you pay for. 

UFS flash storage has other big advantages over older flash storage too, it's smaller and consumes less battery power. 

Or they could simply get a M.2 SSD if they want higher speeds. A small 256GB M.2 2242 costs just below 20€, 25€ for the even smaller 2230 format. Also, they both come with 2000MB/s second read and ~1000MB/s write. For 30€ you're already able to get a 480GB SSD, so why not go this route for extendable storage?

Also sure, Android Phones have the capability for UFS 3.x - but their chips can't keep up with that, as evidenced whenever you're getting some lengthy loading screens. UFS speeds are highly hypothetical and just like SSDs need multiple chips to achieve their full potential. 256GB SLC would be the absolute minimum fur UFS3.x to even make a difference over past standards - but at the same time, you can get cheaper 500GB MLC with similar speeds. In other words, going UFS 3.x and less than 500GB would be a waste of UFS. At that point, I don't think Nintendo would create another storage tier anymore.

Even UFS 2.2 is going to be considerably faster than the eMMC 5.1 the Switch 1 uses now and way faster than an SD Card though. Android phones have a lot of bloatware too and Switch 2 probably will also have LPDDR5 RAM (pretty fast) which will help utilize that hypothetical UFS speed better, not all Android phones have that.

Would I like M.2 SSD and all that jazz ... sure, but I think it would make the system too expensive and/or take money away that could spent on the chipset/RAM, which I think are more important. 

I think UFS is probably the best compromise. It's cheap and widely available and faster than the current Switch or SD Cards. eMMC is too slow for a system that's going to have a large increase in system RAM and larger game file sizes, SD Card is even worse.

If games like Zelda: ToTK already have like load/wait times of 47 seconds to get into a game, I mean you're going to be seeing 1+ minute waits on Switch 2 without a change, which is kind of hilarious for a company that basically handed over the stationary home console market to Sony because they were that adverse to like 10 seconds of loading back in the day.