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Conina on 08 November 2024
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Pemalite said:
Conina said:

Prices for flash memory have also gone down a lot since the Switch launch in 2017.

microSD-cards are starting by 5 cents per GB... and Nintendo will probably get better prices from the manufacturers.

NAND is a bad form of long term storage, they tend to bit-flip/bit rot and lose data.

Yeah, especially if they aren't used for a long time. Therefore I turn on my old consoles and handhelds with memory cards/sticks (for save games / settings or even game downloads) for a few minutes at least once per year (f.e. PS1, PS2, PSP, PS Vita, DS, 3DS, Wii U).

Pemalite said:

Mask ROM is the preferable choice as that is the typical form of memory in Nintendo's carts in the NES/SNES/N64/Gameboy/Gameboy Advance/DS and can last decades.

Many Switch and even 3DS carts are using "hybrid" memory where Rom and NAND are bundled together or they just use plain NAND and as such... Some of the older carts have started to fail.

The downside to ROM is that it's expensive and it's capacity doesn't scale upwards.

As far as I understand it, Nintendo game cartridges since the Nintendo DS (and the PS Vita cartridges) don't use Mask ROMs anymore but flash-memory-based "XtraROMs"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Game_Card

Which makes me "a bit" worried about my DS-, Vita-, 3DS- and Switch-games on cartridges.


But at least, the durability seems to be a lot better than data on rewritable NAND memory (microSD cards and SSDs):
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/270216-nintendo-switch-cartridge-eprom-or-maskrom/

"As macronix had stated themselves, their "XtraROM" HybridFlash technology are guaranteed to hold data for at least 20 years, and that definitely doesn't sound like it's Maskrom to me. the fact that macronix had explicitly given us this estimate leads me to believe that they've already done all the relevant testing on these XtraROM chips beforehand which led to their 20 year estimation of data retention for this particular product."

Since the Nintendo DS has its 20th anniversary this month (time flies!), the next years will be interesting with reference to reports about DS games stopping to work.

And the upside to "XtraROMs" is, that it's capacity should scale upwards (because it's flash-memory based) and should have similar cost reductions over the years as microSD cards and SSDs.