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Chrkeller said:
I have the same question to be honest. I am not finding many SD express cards at 800 mb/s that aren't $200-$300 for 512 gb. Doesn't seem like they are readily available, at least not at Amazon or Scan. Maybe Nintendo will have to sell custom expansions themselves? I kind of get these cards are rare and not available. Cameras don't need 800 mb/s, thus the market for fast SD cards is niche? edit Not sure if that is the same thing people are thinking for S2 storage expansion. Kind of pricey. |
There are several approaches Nintendo can take to make it a non-issue even with a bog-standard SD card.
1) Large SLC cache to hide the bandwidth and latency deficit.
2) More god damn Ram so the console doesn't need to waste power streaming from storage.
3) Just because it's UFS 3.1, doesn't mean the internal storage is operating at UFS 3.1 maximum transfer rates, it's likely much lower as Nintendo doesn't have the power budget or room for a large compliment of NAND chips for parallelism of memory transfers.
4) There are other cards on the market other than Cfexpress.
I.E. SD Cards can operate at 3.9GB/s with the version 8.0 standard as it uses full duplex PCI-E.
| Soundwave said: 256GB was chosen for a reason, I don't think it's random, it's because Nintendo knows most 3rd party games are 150GB max ... 256GB ensures all their development partners that you can make your game on Switch 2 and every system technically has the internal storage to hold the entire game. 128GB would have been a problem, 256GB isn't. |
Anyone who actually owns an Xbox or Playstation since 2013 understands how annoying it is to constantly install, update, transfer and shuffle around games when your storage is 512GB.
I remember on my launch Xbox One with it's available (Once the OS stole it's fair share and accounting for the measurement difference between HDD and OS manufacturers) 362GB of HDD having to spend 10's of hours uninstalling and installing games just because I wanted to play something different.
And with many games over 100GB these days, 256GB just isn't enough for the long term... Remember it's going to be a system that people will be potentially gaming in 2032 and beyond. - Think about the longer term.
Heck, the 32GB on the Switch was arguably not enough.
It's not convenient. It's not fun. It's not a good design choice. More storage, more ram is needed.
| Phenomajp13 said: Yeah thanks for this, all my research has shown this faster memory could be expensive like the SSDs for PS5/Xbox series. So I'll probably be investing this holiday before Switch 2 releases. I don't get the concern though, Nintendo games will most likely still be fully playable physically unlike the other two consoles where yeah they give you about a terabyte but they also force you to install all your games and have far larger sizes. Nintendo games will likely continue to be the highest selling games on Switch 2 and will not require a download. I personally don't but anymore Nintendo games digitally to conserve space for my 3rd party games. |
Many Switch physical games mandate a download.
But with the carts themselves, Nintendo has also started to use cheaper NAND in some carts, especially the larger ones instead of ROM, so eventually the data will die on the carts anyway. NAND isn't good for long term storage.
| Chrkeller said: Fast memory is super expensive. I think I spent $300 for my PC M2 drive and M2 won't work with portables, gets way too hot. |
Well that's a blatant lie.
HANDHELD Portables with M.2:
1) Steamdeck.
2) Rog Ally.
3) Ayaneo 2S.
4) OneXPlayer OneXFly.
5) Lenovo Legion Go.
And more. (I can list them if you want, but I think I made my point!)
There are a bunch of tablets and laptops with M.2 as well.
The correct statement would have been "SOME" M.2 SSD's get hot. Usually only the super fast ones.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
