Topic: MicroSD Express

Yesterday's hot new rumor for Switch 2. MicroSD cards with 800-900 MB/s speed. With a costs currently around twice as much as standard microsd cards. Just a few thoughts.

1) I suppose this rules out an SSD for internal memory?
2) Currently the largest MicroSD Express card is only 256GB. Mildly troublesome for those of us who use 1TB+ microsd cards in their Switch.
3) Will the Switch 2 still utilize slower microsd cards or will a MicroSD Express card be the minimum for expansion memory?

https://shop.sandisk.com/products/memory-cards/microsd-cards/...

@Magician Ug. I guess, here we go again with waiting for larger capacity cards to hit the market and for their prices to come down.

You know, I bought a U3 400gb card for my switch assuming it would be somewhat futureproof. Guess I shouldn't be surprised its going to be sub optimal for Switch 2.

(and there better be an official switch 2 controller with analog triggers for racing games. My kingdom for analog triggers on a Nintendo console!😉)

I would actually hope for the Switch 2 to have an SSD and different storage options at launch

@Magician
What do you mean by "SSD" here? It has 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage included and it's plenty fast. There's no user replaceable SSD sure but microSD Express is also plenty fast enough and is designed to be replaceable. So I don't see the issue here

Are microSD Express cards more expensive than regular microSD cards? Well yeah. But they're more expensive because they're faster. Also the standard is backwards compatible with regular microSD cards so you should be able to use them.... although obviously with significantly degraded performance

Probably an SSSTC NVMe SSD like Steam Deck, because I doubt you could fit a bigger SSD inside a Switch 2

@MrCarlos46
Yeah, but to what end? The entire point of SD Express is that it exposes PCI Express lanes to the SD Card (or microSD in this case). And the internal storage being UFS 3.1 should be faster than most MicroSD Express cards. It's not the full width 4x PCIe 3 or higher lanes of NVMe but it's a hell of a lot faster than the eMMC in the Switch or indeed any SATA SSDs. These are more-or-less the same thing in all but name

So I'm a bit confused about what people are actually wanting out of this. Seems to me that "SSD" is just a bit of a buzz-word for "good" that people have latched onto. Would it be better if Switch 2 had NVMe storage? I mean, technically, sure.... but microSD Express, UFS 3.1 and indeed the Switch 2 physical games are going to be plenty fast enough

I guess for even faster speeds than most other storage drives, kinda like PS5 and Xbox Series X/S use SSDs.

@MrCarlos46
SD Class 6/V6: 6MB/s
SD Class U1/V10: 10MB/s (Switch external storage recommendation)
SD Class V30: 30MB/s
SD Class V60: 60MB/s
eMMC: ~200MB/s (Switch internal storage)
UFS 1.0: ~300MB/s
UFS 2.0: ~600MB/s
SATA: ~750MB/s (PS4/XBOne, if you replaced the mechanical storage with an SSD)
UFS 3.0: ~3GB/s (Switch 2 internal storage)
SD Express: ~1-4GB/s (Switch 2 expandable storage)
NVMe 3.0: 4GB/s (Steam Deck)
NVMe 4.0: 8GB/s
NVMe 5.0: 16GB/s

......... I don't think we should be worried about performance here. As I said, SSD is being used as a buzz word here. Functionally Switch 2 will have a storage sub-system that outclasses most PC portables currently on the market. Especially given it'll have dedicated file compression hardware

No need to go extremely crazy with storage type. At least something that can also be faster than the current Switch.

News is a couple days old, but...

Gamestop listing leak suggests 512GB microSD express cards are inbound in 2025.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/switch-2-accessory-skus-foun...

@Magician Yeah, that's great we're not going to be limited to 256GB express cards. 512GB+ would be better. I hope 512 is availabe for launch.

And on PC it's only when you do large file transfers regularly that you actually feel the difference between different types of SSD. Even in games like Ratchet And Clank: A Rift Apart that supports DirectStorage the difference between running it from an NVMe 4 SSD and running it from a SATA SSD is too small to be of any noticable value. The old Switch storage is roughly in the same ballpark as a mechanical hard drive except the search times are reduced a LOT. So that's slow enough that you will actually notice. But until solutions like DirectStorage gains much more widespread use and until games become large enough to require it to function SATA storage and stuff like SD express will be plenty.

Doesn't seem super useful to me when I already have a full 1TB Switch card and I am expecting to buy several ports of games which are 100GB+ on PlayStation. It will be years until an affordable 2 TB microsSD express card arrives and I feel like that's about the size we need for Switch 2.

I'm wondering if switch 2 was possibly delayed to this year because they were waiting for when express cards could come to market. With such a performance bump, launching switch 2 with last gen sd cards could have seemed less impressive.

@FishyS

It depends on how much you value load times. Currently, microSD cards 1TB or larger have a write speed of 190MB/s. Express cards are 4x faster. In addition to that, we aren't sure if Nintendo are going to mandate the use of Express cards. Probably not, more like a strong recommendation.

@Magician I'm pretty confident the new cards won't be mandated, I'm just kind of annoyed we will be going into yet another cycle of waiting for better micro sd cards because Nintendo doesn't like to give us enough built-in storage. I'm jealous of the 8TB PS5 can have. I do fully understand Nintendo's reasoning though — almost half of Nintendo's game profit still comes from physical games, the average Nintendo user has relatively few games, and Nintendo wants to keep the price down and doesn't want to have multiple models with different storage sizes. All valid reasons.

One interesting thing though is the new microSD card protocol has a maximum theoretical limit of 128 TB rather than the 2 TB from the Switch-generation cards. Not that the express cards will get to 128TB during Switch 2's lifetime, but it's nice that they have room to grow beyond 2TB.

I am waiting to see what 512G and even 1tb express microsd will be like?

Anyone seen a 512 or 1tb release in the wild yet?

@SwitchForce None of the main companies seem to be acknowledging larger than 256GB exist yet. A few online stores have 'coming soon' pages but stores do that all the time for products they know will come eventually.

If the rumours about Switch 2 using these cards are true, I wonder if Samsung or SanDisk will drop 512GB cards in April after the Switch 2 information is public.

@FishyS I hoped they do this before April second like the GameStop Aussie leak had listed SKU for the larger Express MicroSD. I like to make a decision to keep my 256 before the return date is closed as Amazon shows them out of inventory listing.