The Nintendo Switch 2 had its big debut on Wednesday, and the new console appears to be a significant, albeit straightforward, upgrade over its extremely popular predecessor. Sandwiched between the new Donkey Kong and (pricier) Mario Kart games, mouse mode and overhauled party chat features, however, was another significant update: The device supports faster microSD Express cards. Although it may not be the most exciting feature, it should result in faster load times and better storage performance for the upcoming handheld console. During its presentation, the company briefly showcased new 256GB cards from Samsung and SanDisk, featuring Mario logos printed on them.
However, the announcement came with a significant caveat: The console is only compatible with microSD Express. The cards most people use today, which are based on the older UHS-I bus interface, will only work for loading videos and screenshots from an original Switch, not playing games, according to Nintendo’s support site. Nintendo claims that this restriction is necessary to maintain the Switch 2’s performance upgrades, and it’s worth noting that the console itself comes with a more generous 256GB of space by default. Nevertheless, if you ever need to expand the device’s storage, this change will likely make doing so more expensive, while drastically reducing the options you have to choose from.
What are microSD Express cards?
SD Express is a relatively recent but seldom-used standard that allows SD cards to utilize the NVMe protocol and PCIe interface, which is the underlying technology used by SSDs. A microSD Express card features a second row of “pins” on its back and can utilize a single lane’s worth of PCIe bandwidth. As a result, it can produce dramatically faster read and write speeds than its UHS-I counterparts. While the latter advertise sequential transfer rates up to 104 megabytes per second (MB/s), microSD Express cards have a theoretical maximum of 985 MB/s.
This is far behind the NVMe SSDs used by the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, but in theory, it makes Express cards faster than some older SATA-based SSDs when it comes to loading game levels, retrieving saves, or copying games to external storage. It’s worth noting that many UHS-I microSD cards can exceed the 104 MB/s limit with proprietary card readers, but they still fall well short of microSD Express levels even with those.
Prior to Wednesday, the only reliably available microSD Express card we could find was Samsung’s Pro Plus — another UHS-I card we recommend in our buying guide — which costs $17 for 128GB, $23 for 256GB, $38 for 512GB, and $80 for 1TB as of this writing. That’s a huge difference.
What’s more, the Play Pro is the only purchasable microSD Express card we’ve seen thus far that even supports capacities greater than 256GB. Nintendo says the console can support up to 2TB of external storage, but no Express card with that capacity appears to exist yet.
