It is said that Samsung collaberated with a customer to produce these cards, and that customer may be Nintendo for Switch 2 for bigger games and faster loading.
Samsung announces new micro sd card faster than ssd. Could Switch 2 be using this?
- Thread starter Gamernyc78
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This type of tech could really flip gaming around in some ways.
Imagine they keep working on SD cards and they become significantly faster than SSDs... Or any storage solution...
We could have a home console that focuses more on physical games again.
Which would be a great reversal of the march towards all digital. It would offer a very different option to consumers, one where ownership and quality of delivery are valued over convenience and mass consumption.
Imagine they keep working on SD cards and they become significantly faster than SSDs... Or any storage solution...
We could have a home console that focuses more on physical games again.
Which would be a great reversal of the march towards all digital. It would offer a very different option to consumers, one where ownership and quality of delivery are valued over convenience and mass consumption.
OP
OP
It could be Nintendo, but not the way you'd assume. This microSD card would be way too expensive for shipping actual games on, but it could be very useful as a storage option in the Switch 2. If Nintendo does have a decompression block as rumored, and say that block can do 4x decompression, if the system can support up to 800 MB/s microSD cards it'd be able to decompress up to 2.4 GB of data per second.
That would be pretty neat for a Switch 2, and save on needing a faster raw speed drive installed. MicroSD is also also lower power consumption than an m.2 drive, even among the smallest type, so there's also that consideration.
That would be pretty neat for a Switch 2, and save on needing a faster raw speed drive installed. MicroSD is also also lower power consumption than an m.2 drive, even among the smallest type, so there's also that consideration.
OP
OP
If mass produced it could be greatly reduced in price who knows, certainly cheaper than 4 Layer blue rays
who cares about SATA SSD? PS5 support non less than 5000mb/s and gamers like have 7000mb/s and faster SSD coming.
An SD card would be so much easier to upgrade though, when they come up with super fast 8 Tb sd cards I'll be all over it
It would be nice if this was true, but if the UHS-II microsd cards are so freakin' expensive I can't really imagine Nintendo adopting this tech that is even more expensive.
And since no one is using those microsd express cards yet, this would be very similar to the Vita memory cards that contributed to the platform's spectacular failure.
I think Nintendo would be much better served with an expansion port that uses M.2 2230 NVMe drives like the Steam Deck, but what do I know..
Nintendo tends to implement technology at least 5 years old and therefore cheap. I’d say no.
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*Super frustrated with my stupid laptop keys and draft wasn't saved so not retyping everything*
Not really. Fastest current Samsung microSD on the market big enough for a game is the Pro Ultimate series. $17 for 128 GB 200 MB/s, probably closer to $11 without a reader/adapter.
Found a 10-pack of Sony 128 GB Blu-Rays on Amazon Japan for 9,073 Yen, or $60.33 USD. Per-disc cost of $6.03. Keep in mind that pack is being sold for some profit margin so actual per-disc cost is probably like $5.50 or even lower.
Benefit of a microSD over Blu-Ray though is data compression; data on Blu-Ray can't be compressed that much because it goes from drive to storage, I don't think the Blu-Ray drive interfaces with the I/O decompression hardware the way the Flash Memory Controller (for the SSD) does.
Nintendo can probably get away with 64 GB capacity Pro Ultimate microSD cards for physical game storage, and use light 2:1 decompression IC block in Switch 2 for decompressing the data. That would probably cost them $7-8 per card, maybe cheaper. Dunno if peak 200 MB/s speeds remain but if so, 2:1 decompression would make that more like 400 MB/s (the I/O decompression block needs to have the processing power and bandwidth to do that though, keep in mind any storage bandwidth access will likely take away from total system memory bandwidth when used, and I doubt Switch 2 has as robust an I/O subsystem setup as the PS5 or even Xbox Series consoles).
So I can see Nintendo using 64 GB Pro Ultimate microSD cards (probably slower than peak 200 MB/s but still much faster than 4x Blu-Ray) as the physical media for Switch 2 games, and the newer card in the OP as user-replaceable storage. And Switch 2 will probably have some private NAND block as an OS partition with critical system files stored & encrypted there inaccessible by users or game applications.
Blue rays were so expensive when they first came out that most people still used DVDs for movies, for several years.
Its also great that it can be used with consoles (the ps3 had an sd card slot) laptops,pc and phones. It's a universal medium.
As much as I like blue rays, they have been totally eclipsed by the digital revolution
Probably yeah, if the Switch has at least 2:1 decompression and the hardware to handle it. 2:1 is considered "safe" compression IIRC because it's lossless, when you get to ratios higher than that data can get lossy but that depends on a lot of factors (like the type of data, the compression standard being used on the data, the file type (for some data type and file type can be different like with 3D model meshes)).
So a 64 GB cartridge would in theory hold 128 GB worth of data. But, maybe in practice it'd be less optimal than this.
I'm not saying microSD isn't a better format for data storage than Blu-Ray: it is. But I'm just considering the practical chances Nintendo used a spec like in the OP as physical storage for Switch 2 games. Can't see it happening, it'll be too expensive.
But the 200 MB/s Pro Ultimate microSD card I mentioned earlier? That could be a possible option.
I'm pretty sure Nintendo is comfortable using lossy compression given the hardware they have now and will have next year, but you need to consider that every single game is already using compressed assets otherwise you'd be looking at 500GB downloads.
64GB as a top limit is really anemic even for a single game nowadays.
In all honestly, existing MicroSD would be fine for Switch 2 games. It works totally fine on Steam Deck, and those games are 10x bigger than Switch 2 games will be on average. Tears of the Kingdom is a huge Nintendo game at 16GB.