What is “MicroSD Express,” and why is it mandatory for the Nintendo Switch 2?

Little-used 2019 standard bridges a gap between internal and external storage.

See full article...

 

[pavon]

Do you really not understand the massive benefit of requiring a higher minimum level of storage performance in a video game centric platform? Are you unaware that Sony and Microsoft are already doing this with their current consoles?

Yeah, streaming asset loading is one of those boring background details that you only think about when it doesn't work, but really requires a lot of effort on the developer to get right. Making developers handle variable speed media by dynamically varying pop-in distance or adding optional loading screens is a bunch of time and effort that could be spent making the game better for everyone if you just mandate minimum media speed.

But my cheap ass still wishes I could use a slow microSD card to spill over my existing library of Switch 1 games until the internal storage fills up with Switch 2 games.

 

[vortex_mak]

Why is the random write speed indicator shown in the image still A1?
Regular micro SD cards are already up to A2.

I would have thought the an express card would at least be equivalent or faster than the A2 standard

 

[Zilveari]

I'm actually glad that Sony mandated a minimum speed for the secondary drive. I see this as a good thing here too, but the $200 price tag for the 1TB mSDe that was recently released hurts when I consider that entry into the Switch 2 would cost me close to $800 before ever buying a game.

 

[just6979]

Though, most games on the Steam Deck run just fine from a MicroSD card, including current gen console ports.

"Runs just fine" is vastly different from starting & loading in a friendly time! Not mention any kind of internal "loading" like fast-travel.

Example: Spider-Man 2 on my PC with just a PCIe3 x4 nVME gets to the menu in about 10 seconds (pressing Circle/B to skip the splash vids), and then loads into the game itself in seconds. Fast-travel anywhere on the map is effectively instant: the couple seconds of animation and fade-in used make the transit less jarring is all that is needed and you're swinging or flying again right away. Not so on either of those fronts when running from an SD card on the Deck, ~90Mbps is just not enough, especially since it can't be maintained because that little chuck of plastic can't dissipate heat very well!

But something like the PC/PS5 loading speeds should be possible from external storage on the Switch2 or any future haldheld using SDEx.

(I may do an experiment with Doom 2016, since that also loads into levels in 1-2 seconds on my PC or from the Deck's internal storage. It definitely takes longer from SD, but now I'm curious how much longer a tightly optimized, but almost decade old, game with lots of detailed assets takes to load.

 

[bsneeze]

I'm probably being dense: what's the relevance of this?

there is none; you got rickroyed

 

[just6979]

Why is the random write speed indicator shown in the image still A1?
Regular micro SD cards are already up to A2.

I would have thought the an express card would at least be equivalent or faster than the A2 standard

The A ratings are about IOPS, good for random small reads & writes, not throughput. These "early" SDEx cards either just might not be using chips with high IOPS, or more likely they're just not tested for A2 because throughput is much more important for something like loading a game.

 

[Gandoron]

This is progress and pushing everyone to get to a better performance and load speed. Good article, but stop complaining about this minor pushes for "new and better standards".

I just had to move away from a phone with a MicroSD where I had an extra 1Tb of storage. Wish phones kept the support like Nintendo. At least they didn't remove SD and charge you massive amounts for small boosts of storage (looking at you Apple).

 

[just6979]

To me, it sounds like another dick move from a corporate monopoly

Monopoly? On what? Game consoles? Nope: see Sony and Microsoft. Handheld game consoles? Nope: see Valve, Asus, Lenovo, MSI, and AyaNeo.

Their example of card options directly included a non-branded 3rd-party card! Yeah, some people will buy the Nintendo-branded ones, for the same reason they buy 3rd-party controllers with Mario skins: there is a bit of assurance of quality, they can afford it, and it's fun! But when they explicitly show a non-branded alternative as an example, that's pretty non-monopoly.

 

[Granadico]

I experienced that problem with Ori, but discovered that putting my Switch into Aeroplane Mode completely fixed it. I have no idea whether that got fixed later, but it may not've been a storage speed issue.

I've looked everywhere for info about this and didn't see anyone talking about it. I'll try this next time I play, I gave up on the game because of it.

 

[atomicpowerrobot]

IMO, it's not very generous. It's more like "bare minimum for a flagship product in 2025, but also kind of skinflint."

At least they give you the ability to add extra storage that is (nearly) on par as local storage. Unlike certain other 256-is-plenty companies I could name.

 

[atomicpowerrobot]

I appreciate the new tech and understand why Nintendo is using it, but... can we not add yet another icon to the glut of icons that MicroSD cards already have on them?

View attachment 106710

Just look at this picture. MicroSD XC I, UHS-3, A1, now EX. Five icons that basically say "this card is fast" in five different ways. STAHP!

I think you mean it says:
microSD EXPRESS
MiCrO SD XC I EX
A1 3[in a bucket]

 

[just6979]

At least it's easy to upgrade the M.2 drive in the Steam Deck, although I haven't done it yet.

Yeah, but upgrading is different than expanding.

Some people just don't ever want to think about opening up a Deck. Some who would open it don't want to deal with the transfers, especially if they upgrade sizes incrementally for budget reasons or whatever.

Some people actually like being able to swap SD cards and kind of treat them like cartidges and/or so they don't see hundreds of installed games at once. I don't get it, but the plethora of Switch and Deck cases with SD card storage says people want to do it.

Fast expandable storage should be the norm, we've had the standards forever on a tech time scale. But phone manufacturers looking to boost their margins made it the norm to be stuck with whatever you start with, to nudge people towards those higher margin big storage options. I mean, Apple charges $200 for a 256 GB increase from the base iPhone 16 (and weirdly only $200 for 512 GB more after than, which makes the 1TB model look so much better than the 512GB!), and yet people are crying that 256GB in a $450 console is too little for the price. The market says not so!

 

[opkw]

While it would not have been a “Nintendo”-like move, I wish there was an option to install a M.2 2230 card. You can easily get 1TB of storage for about $70.

 

[Alexstarfire]

Correction: I think this statement is backwards, was it meant to say, "there is a small but measurable increase in launch and loading times when loading games from the original Switch's internal storage instead of from the microSD card."

No, that would mean it takes longer to load from internal. You want Launching and loading times to be low (i.e. quick), not high (i.e. slow).

 

[mexaly]

We're creating an archeological layer of write-only data.
Yottabyte-years of data that will never be accessed.

 

[S-T-R]

View attachment 106708

This is a bad take even without the nonsense meme format.

The other game consoles, which have been out for years, shipped with 1TB of onboard storage. This is relatively awful in comparison.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that Nintendo has already given this matter some thought(and the primitives exist because of the concerns of existing PCIe users; IOMMUs and DMA protection and such; both for VM-slinging hyperscalers really worried about cross-VM attacks and thunderbolt users concerned about drive-by malice peripherals snagging bitlocker keys and such); but I'll be curious whether the microSD Express slot turns out to be a way in for some jailbreaking shenanigans.

I suspect that there are more than a few microSD controllers that are more naïve than one would like in the face of a badly behaved peripheral; but PCIe, by design, has significantly more power than even SDIO. Full DMA capability; lots of fun potential.

 

[atomicpowerrobot]

While it would not have been a “Nintendo”-like move, I wish there was an option to install a M.2 2230 card. You can easily get 1TB of storage for about $70.

I wish they would standardize a hot-swappable SD style/size card for larger devices that's just an m.2 2230 inside. I hate microSD b/c it's so small and fragile. Kind of like what Xbox Series systems do, but without the stupid tab hanging out. Push in to secure and push to remove, just like SD. Basically just big enough to be have a shell around a m2. 2230 with a robust push connector. They could mandate single sided to minimize thickness and use aluminum for the case to help with heat dissipation. They could have different specs based on # of PCI lanes on the port itself, but all cards would be compatible with x1, x4, etc.

There's definitely a use case for microSD, like in phones, but a Switch could definitely handle something more robust/faster. There'd be a little bit of weight trade off, but it would also not die if you look at it with a warm smile.

 

[just6979]

As an example, some PS5 games use less storage than their PS4 counterparts (even when essentially being identical contents-wise) as they can rely upon being run from an ssd rather than a hdd; so the potential for devs to optimise is three.

You got an example of where a modern game is storing pre-calculated mipmaps or mesh LODs on disk? Having to stream all the different quality levels up to and including the best one is going to take overall more bandwith than streaming just the best ones and making the mipmaps and mesh LODs in memory as is usual.

I think the storage reduction is both build optmizations realized in the time since the original release and taking advantage of new compression formats supported by the PS5.

 

[atomicpowerrobot]

It may enhance game play, but the smart move would be to create a port that can do both, and sense what card is in it to accommodate the card. It has the same interface, after all.

Alternatively, you'd have a ton of people not understanding why their games run like crap even after they card they paid extra for the microSD with a little mario mushroom/star on it.

Much better to only accept the cards that are performant. The real issue is just that they look exactly the same and have the same form factor and microSD is already an arcane mess of symbols and glyphs and random meaningless jargon before you even get to "express". To say nothing of fakes and ultra-cheap crap.

 

[just6979]

This is a bad take even without the nonsense meme format.

The other game consoles, which have been out for years, shipped with 1TB of onboard storage. This is relatively awful in comparison.

The "other game consoles" are obsessed with shiny pixels and diminishing returns on detailed environments. Nintendo is not. 1st-party Nintendo games are much smaller than what are effectively PC games. I have like 50 games on my Switch's 256 GB SD card, while one of my PC's 2TB SSDs contains just a dozen "AAA"-ish games spanning the same time period as the Switch lifecycle.

For people who are just getting a Switch 2 for new Mario and Zelda and Metroid and Kirby and Smash games, the internal storage will likely be just fine, and the price is friendlier because of it. Those who do want to get those big PC ports can get a very-fast-enough external option for what will realistically be not too much more than the price of a Switch 2 would have gone up by.

It's far from awful, absolutely and objectively. Rather, it's relatively nice that they're not gouging with overly-expensive tiers of higher storage like some other portable electronics companies, while also nicely offering the nowadays quite rare external storage expansion!

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I wish they would standardize a hot-swappable SD style/size card for larger devices that's just an m.2 2230 inside. I hate microSD b/c it's so small and fragile. Kind of like what Xbox Series systems do, but without the stupid tab hanging out. Push in to secure and push to remove, just like SD. Basically just big enough to be have a shell around a m2. 2230 with a robust push connector. They could mandate single sided to minimize thickness and use aluminum for the case to help with heat dissipation. They could have different specs based on # of PCI lanes on the port itself, but all cards would be compatible with x1, x4, etc.

There's definitely a use case for microSD, like in phones, but a Switch could definitely handle something more robust/faster. There'd be a little bit of weight trade off, but it would also not die if you look at it with a warm smile.

That's pretty close to what "CFexpress" is(though not specifically designed as an adapter for 2230s); and it is a standard; but relatively weakly adopted. Some mid to high end cameras; along with ingest interfaces sold to users of those cameras(along with the Xbox series X and S using a proprietary slight variant of the spec); but not super popular.

 

[Edified]

I wonder how hot those things get...?

I know m.2 is challenging in that form factor but I sure wish they would have tried. Or, you know make a HDMI-Only version with m.2 storage, since Family Game Sharing is here it makes sense. TV-only plus Switch 2 Lites is much better than dock swapping.

 

[UnnDunn]

I think you mean it says:
microSD EXPRESS
MiCrO SD XC I EX
A1 3[in a bucket]

Fuck it, let’s go full Capcom on this shit. “SUPER MicroSD XC I EX +A1 Turbo Hyper Storage 3 Gaming”. Can never have too many modifiers.

 

[just6979]

I'm interested to see what the load difference is between Switch 2 carts and the digital storage (I'm assuming the onboard storage and SD Express are in the same ballpark). Ori and the Will of the Wisps I bought physically but has massive stuttering issues where the game freezes for a second or so until it continues that I don't see talked about often, probably because more people bought it digitally rather than the physical double pack. I wonder if that's an issue for bigger games like Witcher 3 that are still on cart.

It is nice to see Nintendo being pretty damn modern with the hardware. I think $450 is competitive with what it's offering and what the Steam Deck etc. have.

Yes, I was hoping for some info around a possible new cartridge, since the Switch 2 Edition games are definitely going have quite a lot more storage-intensive resources to load. Obviously a new slot would still have to read Switch OG carts, but could use extra pins like USB-A 3.0 and UHS/SD-Express to enable a faster interface to the new carts. I wouldn't be surpised to learn that there are going to be new carts and they are just read-only SD Express cards in a Switch-cart package with a notch or something to prevent them from fitting in a Switch 1. Since the new SoC obviously supports PCIe, it wouldn't be too crazy to route some lanes to the cart slot as well as the SD slot. Or even they could still fit in a Switch 1 and that console gets an update to recognize them and say it won't work.

 

[obarthelemy]

Now I'm nostalgic for when I could use one in my phone to increase the storage by a Terabyte.

Today I can use one in my phone to increase its storage by 2 terabytes ;-p

 

[Bocarcaro]

You got an example of where a modern game is storing pre-calculated mipmaps or mesh LODs on disk? Having to stream all the different quality levels up to and including the best one is going to take overall more bandwith than streaming just the best ones and making the mipmaps and mesh LODs in memory as is usual.

I think the storage reduction is both build optmizations realized in the time since the original release and taking advantage of new compression formats supported by the PS5.

This is known. For both optical media and hard drives (spinning rust) some developers tried to optimize the physical layout of assets on disk, frequently by duplication.
The seeking latency reduction did help some games, at the cost of greater sizes.
Sorry, can’t look for the video where this was discussed right now, but around the launch of the ps5 there was some chatter about it.

 

[obarthelemy]

I am glad they did this actually. i have always felt that using the added storage was inferior. this kinda makes sure it is not.

It still is, just not as much.

Also, performance is an issue, durability is a BIG issue. I'm using a lot of SD cards, I regularly have them die on me. Especially inside raspi, I've switched to the "durable" ones (from Samsung, few of the durable ones are really any better).

 

[wayloncovil]

At what point do you decide to switch from using a micro SD card over to one of those really short ssds? If it's actually cheaper to buy an SSD with four times the storage, perhaps Nintendo should have made the choice to have an expansion slot that will take one of the really short m.2 2230 ssds that they can just pop in there. Then, the price of those really small ssds would come down. And, the speed would be faster than the MicroSD card, and you could get really large ssds to put in your switch 2.

 

[obarthelemy]

IMO, it's not very generous. It's more like "bare minimum for a flagship product in 2025, but also kind of skinflint."

Apple would like to have a word with you.

 

[just6979]

Or, you know make a HDMI-Only version with m.2 storage, since Family Game Sharing is here it makes sense. TV-only plus Switch 2 Lites is much better than dock swapping.

No, it's really not.

I have a nice gaming PC on the TV, a Switch with it's dock on the same TV, a Steam Deck with no dock. The Switch is 1000% more likely to have a game passed from handheld to TV/docked or vice-verse, because it's virtually seamless. You don't even have to put the Switch to sleep! Though I usually do and then wake it with whatever controller I plan on using on the TV for extra seamless-ness. But that's all it takes, 2 steps with no waiting: remove from or insert into dock, let game detect controllers, game on!

Moving from Deck to PC or PC to Deck means: Saving the game, Exiting the game, Waiting for Steam Cloud to sync, Sleeping the previous system. Waking the new system, Waiting for Steam Cloud to sync, Starting the game, Loading the save. Even with the new Family Sharing, most of those steps will still be there to move session from one Switch to another, and believe me, it's not a great solution. Oh and I almost forgot that the Switch does HDMI-CEC, so I don't even need to worry about turning on the TV and setting the input, which the Deck-to-PC swap needs!

There are only a few games I alternate between PC and Deck, and they're pretty much exclusively ones that I explicitly play for set periods, for example No Man's Sky: set aside an hour to do a couple missions or milestones, otherwise it'll be all night! Play on Deck if the TV is busy, on PC if the TV is free, but either way, when I'm done, I'm done until the next session. And still I sometimes sleep the Deck before the cloud sync and it adds extra steps the next time!

Use Family Sharing as intended, for sharing, not as a replacement for one of the Switch's main selling points: being a convertible.

 

[Dputiger]

Correction: I think this statement is backwards, was it meant to say, "there is a small but measurable increase in launch and loading times when loading games from the original Switch's internal storage instead of from the microSD card."

No.

microSD is slower than internal storage. That's quite possibly still true with Switch 2, it's just that the higher external storage performance is high enough that gamers won't need to care which drive has a given game on it.

 

[Dputiger]

I'm actually glad that Sony mandated a minimum speed for the secondary drive. I see this as a good thing here too, but the $200 price tag for the 1TB mSDe that was recently released hurts when I consider that entry into the Switch 2 would cost me close to $800 before ever buying a game.

Why?

The machine comes with 256GB of internal memory. At the very least, that's a cost you could put off for some months after buying the Switch 2.

I'll grant that it still costs ~$700 + tax in total, but I don't see a reason why you can't buy a Switch 2 initially, then add additional storage later after you've gotten some initial use out of the console. You may also get lower prices because, as Ars says, wider popularity and availability of the relevant standard may encourage prices to drop.

 

[Myself]

the concerns of existing PCIe users; IOMMUs and DMA protection and such

Exactly the point I expected to be highlighted in the article -- a wise man once said "Nobody writes device drivers assuming PCIe devices are evil, but PCIe devices can and will be evil."

It's Firewire all over again. Yeah, IOMMUs exist now, but we'll see if they're properly implemented.

 

[just6979]

At what point do you decide to switch from using a micro SD card over to one of those really short ssds? If it's actually cheaper to buy an SSD with four times the storage, perhaps Nintendo should have made the choice to have an expansion slot that will take one of the really short m.2 2230 ssds that they can just pop in there. Then, the price of those really small ssds would come down. And, the speed would be faster than the MicroSD card, and you could get really large ssds to put in your switch 2.

You have to remember that part of it is also swappability and durabilty. Lots of people get a couple few small SD cards and swap them in and out as needed, because it's so easy. No big upfront cost, but they can get effectively infinite storage. Sure, NVMe drives can be hot-swappable, but SD slots and cards are designed for many many more swaps, SSDs not so much. SD cards are also so much more durable than a raw SSD, and so much smaller even before considering some kind of case for a potential hot-swappable external SSD.

The point they consider making the change that is that point that 1st-party games are big enough and storage-speed sensitive enough to warrant way more internal storage as well as something faster than SD Express. Maybe in the Switch 2's successor, or perhaps there will be another evolution in the SD card form-factor by then and it will still be a little tiny fingernail of storage.

 

[ERIFNOMI]

I wish they would standardize a hot-swappable SD style/size card for larger devices that's just an m.2 2230 inside. I hate microSD b/c it's so small and fragile. Kind of like what Xbox Series systems do, but without the stupid tab hanging out. Push in to secure and push to remove, just like SD. Basically just big enough to be have a shell around a m2. 2230 with a robust push connector. They could mandate single sided to minimize thickness and use aluminum for the case to help with heat dissipation. They could have different specs based on # of PCI lanes on the port itself, but all cards would be compatible with x1, x4, etc.

There's definitely a use case for microSD, like in phones, but a Switch could definitely handle something more robust/faster. There'd be a little bit of weight trade off, but it would also not die if you look at it with a warm smile.

That essentially already exists. It's CFexpress. The Xbox expansion card is just a non-standard implementation of it. It's pretty much exclusively used in cameras. There are different forms factors for x1, x2, and x4 devices, but it's essentially just PCIe so I don't think there's any reason they couldn't make x4 size devices (type C) with fewer lanes. There just isn't much reason to do that either.

 

[Dputiger]

This is a bad take even without the nonsense meme format.

The other game consoles, which have been out for years, shipped with 1TB of onboard storage. This is relatively awful in comparison.

It's true that the PS5 and Xbox Series X had much larger drives and shipped at $500 back in 2020. It's also true that the Switch 2 has to account for costs baked in that those systems did not, including a display, a system battery, and two controllers (MS / Sony only include one in a $400 - $500 console). The Switch 2 is also a mobile chip, which means it needs to hit more aggressive binning targets than a console intended for plugged-in only usage.

The impact of inflation also has to be taken into account. $500 in 2020 is $613 in 2025. The Switch 2 starts at $449. Those other game consoles you are referring to cost significantly more than the Switch 2 does when we adjust launch pricing for inflation.

 

[NopeNopeNope]

Nice. Moves like this give the whole industry a jolt forward, forcing critical mass.

Yeah, 100MB/s is enough, but 500MB/s is enougher.

 

[SniperGaulois]

Bigger etchings on old cards make the information stay stable for longer, the i.e. cards from 2000 are smaller but less unstable than today generically, although some manufacturers have steps to enhance durability.

 

[plectrum]

I suspect that Nintendo has already given this matter some thought(and the primitives exist because of the concerns of existing PCIe users; IOMMUs and DMA protection and such; both for VM-slinging hyperscalers really worried about cross-VM attacks and thunderbolt users concerned about drive-by malice peripherals snagging bitlocker keys and such); but I'll be curious whether the microSD Express slot turns out to be a way in for some jailbreaking shenanigans.

I suspect that there are more than a few microSD controllers that are more naïve than one would like in the face of a badly behaved peripheral; but PCIe, by design, has significantly more power than even SDIO. Full DMA capability; lots of fun potential.

Potential for neat stuff, not just attacks.

Micro SD express isn't just PCIe by another name, you have to do some SD protocol stuff to flip the pins into PCIe mode, but it's not that hard - assuming there's a way to do that without too much cooperation with the OS then you could hook an eGPU to it, eg by breaking it out to Oculink connectors. Of course you'd need drivers for that, but if PCs start supporting the cards then that becomes possible.

One thing though, NVMe tends to be a bit power hungry, to the extent of needing its own heatsink. If you compress that into a microSD form factor I expect fairly aggressive thermal throttling.

On the attack front, I would not be surprised if the slot in the Switch is fairly walled off from other parts of the system, since it doesn't need to support arbitrary PCIe devices. Apple uses NVMe in the iPhone and, while there have been a few software attacks on their DART IOMMU, it's not a popular attack vector. Of course an external slot is a bit different to a soldered NVMe chip. Although if they're using off the shelf Nvidia Tegra silicon without further tweaks maybe it's not as walled off as Apple's.