| Conina said: 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. |
Correct. Mask Roms aren't used.
Nintendo are instead using two types of flash memory aka. NOR and NAND.
NOR is for the read-only part and NAND for the save data.
Consoles like 3DS used both in a cart the majority of the time to save data, but the Switch tends to stick with the NOR.
| Conina said: But at least, the durability seems to be a lot better than data on rewritable NAND memory (microSD cards and SSDs): "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." |
The durability is definitely improved as you aren't doing reads/writes constantly. Plus the error correction algorithm helps to reset bad cells.
In saying that...
We are a 3rd of the way through those carts "projected" life times.
| Conina said: 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. |
There have already been reports of DS and 3DS carts failing.
20 years aren't a hard number, it's when the volume of failures start to increase. - You will still have carts that will survive 40+ years.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
