The Cart or the Disk

The “cartridge” has greatly improved since the Nintendo 64 generation. If you take a disc and a cartridge of the same side, the cartridge is better as it’s more loss tolerant, and should have a fast read speed.

Cartridges can hold 32 gigs on a single cart, and that’s pretty damn good. It’s harder to pirate, Blu-ray burners were sold the same time the technology debuted, and you don’t have to worry about scratched discs.

The portability factor of Nintendo Switch is very important, a CD reader would be larger than the Switch, in fact remember the Switch is shorter than a CD and Blu-ray. However, also since the device is in motion while people play it in handheld mode, the reader would potentially have problems.

There’s ways around this lay the device flat while it reads the data into a secondary memory but the fact is, the Switch doesn’t need any of those. It reduces the complexity of the system no CD reader, just a SDcard style reader and it is faster.

Also consider that both Xbox One and Playstation regularly have to install games to the Hard drive for improved read speeds and performance. Switch games could do that, but there’s no need as the SDCard is fast enough it’s not necessary.

The only downside to the Switch is 32 gigs isn’t that much. Many games are being shipped on double sided Blu-rays now, which has at least 50 gigs of data, and even then the data is compressed yet another reason to install the game. But for the Switch, it’s working with smaller cartridges for the time being and it seems just right

Amin