Game Storage Medium

Storage devices can come in several different medium and each one utilises its type of storage it uses differently.

Here is Nintendo's Gameboy Advanced SP Tribal Edition, this handheld console uses and plays games and other media off of a ROM Game Cartidge. This console came about after Nintendo decided to step up from the Gameboy Colour as an improved version of the already released Gameboy Advance (or GBA). Staying true to ROM cartridges, Nintendo continued to use them in all of their handheld consoles and only changed to optical storage mediums (CD/DVD) for their home consoles. A huge benefit of using cartridges is that unlike in other storage mediums, cartridgues are generally memory programmed to run just like the console and so they can neglect having to transfer data through a slower medium allowing for almost instanteous loading as well as software that are run directly from ROM tend to use less RAM which frees up memory for other processes to be carried out.

Much unlike this, the Playstation 3 makes use of the Blu-Ray disc that's storage capacity far exceeds that of the Gameboy Advance SP's, being able to store up to 25 GB (yes, Gigabytes) of data on one disc. These discs in combination with the Playstation 3's already powerful hard drive (currently boasting the ability to retain 500 GB of various types of data, ranging from games, images, audio, video and other miscellaneous files too.) 

With the era of the sixth generation consoles and games, storage became almost entirely relied on the optical disc because as the games consoles being more technologically advanced and games became much more complex, a lot more data storage was required to handle them, the only major game manufacturing companies that hadn't really made this step were Nintendo, who stubbornly refused to give up on their game cartridge storage devices. I believe the reason behind this is due to Nintendo trying to prevent the pirating of their games as the optical disc was much easier to read and reverse engineer however Nintendo were still at a loss as the optical disc for how much data they could store were quickly becoming the least expensive option available whilst cartridges cost a lot more money to produce to the same standard, limiting Nintendo's potential at the time. (Nintendo are now as well as their own cartridges making full use of the optical disc) 

These optical discs came to be known as DVDs and could store up to 4.7 GB of ram, which isn't as impressive as the amount we can store today (like in the Blu-Ray) however at the time this was very impressive, especially for gaming which has been constantly growing in advances and popularity over the years.

Speaking about piracy once again, Nintendo's stubborn tactic of keeping their cartridges turned out to be their trump card in dealing with piracy as cartridges are created as printed circuits on a mothermoard and without the correct hardware and technology they were very difficult to recreate or even extract any data from, the optical disc however was made to run as perfectly with computers as possible and because they were cheaper there wasn't much of a complex method to writing data onto them meaning that anyone with proficient skill on a computer could at the very least copy the contents form a disk to a computer's hard drive or another disc to then be sold off as a pirated copy. 

One method still used to this day to fight back against optical disc copyrighting is modern game consoles now have chips inside of them to verify whether a game has been pirated or not and will block the disc's content if it doesn't pass inspection. That said gamers will probably always find a loophole in gaming systems and found another way to pirate games, the chips being used to verify games infact can be rendered obsolete by experts in the game consoles engineering as they can remove or replace the chip to manipulate it into allowing copied games to carrying functioning as their original retail copies.