What is “MicroSD Express,” and why is it mandatory for the Nintendo Switch 2?
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I'd love to get CF Express cards for my A7R V. The benefit in burst speed for shooting wildlife is amazing. Lossless Compressed Raw can hit over 1000 shots before hitting a write buffer, whereas on a UHS-II card it tops out at 66 shots. It sounds excessive, but when you see something like an Osprey or a Kingfisher doing a dive, that actually does matter.
But the price is insane. A Lexar 160GB CF Express Type A is $180. 320GB is $300. (Or, was way back when I checked originally).
128GB UHS-II cards can be had for around $80.
256GB UHS-I cards are $30.
I'm currently using some UHS-I cards I needed to buy when I was in Canada, and I think I hit the buffer in around 40 shots on full burst, but I usually stick to medium or low burst anyway. It's not perfect, but as an amateur, really, it's good enough that I'd rather save the money I'd spend to fund other hobbies.
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Considering the Steam Deck works well with a standard microSD, I bought a new, non-express card in anticipation of the Switch 2. Hopefully it'll be backward compatible with the older standard, even if it's a bit slower.
It's a shame we can't add more storage via 2230 m.2 drive. I'd even be happy if the dock had an m.2 port! Can you add more storage to the Switch through usb like other consoles? That's a lower cost option, if supported.
It's a shame we can't add more storage via 2230 m.2 drive. I'd even be happy if the dock had an m.2 port! Can you add more storage to the Switch through usb like other consoles? That's a lower cost option, if supported.
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Interesting that last night there was a discussion about microSD express among some friends in VRChat (who were talking about the new switch), and suddenly this article being recommended on Chrome mobile. I didn't even know MicroSD express existed until last night.
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So it was about duplicating data in mupltiple locations to reduce seeking. So really about spinning media vs solid state, access time not necessarily throughput. Not nearly as applicable to comparing throughput of a bunch of solid state options, as in SD vs SDEx vs NVMe. Access time differences between each is going to be virtually negligible, and having a known minimum throughput becomes the best way to ensure a good experience.
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The infertace is certainly backwards compatible since SDEx uses the same extra pins as UHS-II and leaves the old SD pins alone, but a cursory look didn't find anything specifying that SDEx-capable slots and controllers are required to actually support the old interface. I'd be willing to bet it is because SD is usually very strong on backwards compatibility. Hopefully Nintendo doesn't block use of UHS-I or slower cards completely, and instead just refuses to put Switch 2 Enhanced games on a slow non-SDEx card.
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Not to pitch for any brand. You're absolutely right that fakes are everywhere. But at least Samsung has a utility to check a card after you bought it.
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Double check yourself as I am going off memory, but I am pretty sure the reveal yesterday said the MicroSD Express card is required. So don't count on your older card being compatible.
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Yes, relative to my 16GB iPhone from a long time ago, also relatively generous. Low standards.
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Yes, if used broadly, lots of things are relatively X compared to comparator Y. If you don’t use it meaningfully with a comparator, it doesn’t have much meaning.
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I'm a bit salty about the requirement.
I was planning to run all of my existing Switch 1 games off of my existing 512GB microSD card. They are Switch 1 games. There's no technical reason that the Switch 2 can't play non-upgraded Switch 1 games off of an OG microSD card, just like it can play them off of OG Switch 1 cartridges (and just like the PS5 can play PS4 games off of external storage). Once the internal storage was getting full of Switch 2 games, THEN I was planning to upgrade to microSD Express.
But now I have to buy in day 1. I opted for a 512GB card ($100), which will already be over half full once I load my games onto it. That will leave me with a few hundred GB between the internal storage and the card, before I need to upgrade again. I assume this will be years down the line, and by then 2TB microSD Express cards will be less than $100.
I was planning to run all of my existing Switch 1 games off of my existing 512GB microSD card. They are Switch 1 games. There's no technical reason that the Switch 2 can't play non-upgraded Switch 1 games off of an OG microSD card, just like it can play them off of OG Switch 1 cartridges (and just like the PS5 can play PS4 games off of external storage). Once the internal storage was getting full of Switch 2 games, THEN I was planning to upgrade to microSD Express.
But now I have to buy in day 1. I opted for a 512GB card ($100), which will already be over half full once I load my games onto it. That will leave me with a few hundred GB between the internal storage and the card, before I need to upgrade again. I assume this will be years down the line, and by then 2TB microSD Express cards will be less than $100.
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Yeah MicroSD Express is required, as per Nintendo's press release "Nintendo Switch 2 only uses microSD Express cards"
And yeah it kinda sucks that can't add a 2230 m.2 - you can do it very quickly and easily on the Steam Deck - companies finally started selling properly packaged drives - not ones pulled from somewhere.
But then again, this will help MicroSD Express become more common and having a tiny superfast card is going to be awesome
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I've had fake products through Best Buy as well. But at least (like with Amazon) they're pretty good about accepting returns. Never had an issue with Memory Express.
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That's correct. But for some reason the article has been updated to read "there is a small but measurable increase in launch and loading speeds when loading games from the original Switch's microSD card instead of from internal storage". Based on the comments (including the one you replied to), it looks like the article used to say "increase in loading times", which would've been correct, but now says "increase in loading speeds", which for the microSD card I would not expect to be correct.
Weird. I wonder what prompted the edit. Maybe it was incomplete and they'd meant to also either change "increase" to "decrease" or change around the microSD vs internal storage references.
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Who cares about storage capacity when the games are going to cost $90.
I'm never going to fill the 256gb internal drive because there's zero chance I ever buy the console.
I'm never going to fill the 256gb internal drive because there's zero chance I ever buy the console.
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Manufacturers need to list sustained R/W speeds in addition to peak like many do with CF Express type B cards.
I would expect that microSD Express cards would overheat quite quickly doing full speed transfers since my microSD Type I cards get pretty toasty sauntering at their relatively slow transfer rates when doing large transfers.
I would expect that microSD Express cards would overheat quite quickly doing full speed transfers since my microSD Type I cards get pretty toasty sauntering at their relatively slow transfer rates when doing large transfers.
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This doesn’t feel good this feels like another stick-it-to-the-end-user cost cutting where a reasonable company would have just made the thing better and charged a fair price.
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$80. Not $90. That's with EU VAT added.
The new media standard is more expensive than the old one because data transfer rates are higher. The Switch's $300 price in 2017, adjusted for inflation, is now $394. The Switch 2 has a larger display and a number of performance upgrades relative to the Switch 1. The $449 price may well be an attempt by Nintendo to get ahead of Trump's tariffs by picking a price tag they wouldn't have to change immediately if the US imposed new restrictions rather than a price tag that would leave them losing money per unit sold.
I'm not going to argue with anyone who says the Switch is a bad value because they just don't personally want to spend the money, but a $50 increase for a dramatically more powerful system (once you account for inflation) and a media price increase that's tied directly to the performance of that media is fair. There's no evidence of Nintendo forcing people to only buy its own, vastly more expensive drives.
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I wonder if the slot is hardware-capable of reading non-SD-Express. Most SD Express slots already supports non-SD-Express too.
In other words, just a software-enforced limitation.
Perhaps a Nintendo firmware upgrade will be hastily rushed out when people like you complain -- so many Switch 1 owners being mad that they can't easily transfer card-hosted games between Switch 1 and Switch 2 rapidly, especially when you're away from fast Internet.
Let's hope -- I think it's a good requirement for Switch 2 compatible games but I think the requirement should be deleted for non-upgraded Switch 1 games. Or simply it already supports it, just not revealed in the announcement (For obvious "focus on the Switch 2 squirrel" Marketing reasons)
You do point out a good point.
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Ahem, many millions of Android devices have been running apps from memory cards for more than a decade. That being said, it was bit of a morass, some manufacturers skimped on the controller so it'd be crawling along sedately, buying suitable card is adventurous because the quoted sustained rate has little to do with random access, especially random writes. Basically you needed to find a (customer) review of someone doing a storage benchmark on the card to find out how fast is it really. (this is also true of USB sticks...)
Still, even if you can't reliably run apps and games from the external (adopted) storage, it certainly lets you stick netflix downloads etc into it. Or does after you go to settings to switch that option on .. ugh.
These days complete shit µSD cards are more rare, but device storage has generally gotten a lot faster and bigger in the meantime too. Also as pointed out, above 100MB/s speeds didn't really get love for the cards so the performance has fallen behind year after year. So probably people running apps from cards was a lot more common in 2015 than 2025.
There are plenty of complete garbage USB sticks, though. I actually ended up buying an uSD adaptor for USB as I got exasperated of finding something nice for a Linux-on-a-Stick. Those random access times..
Ed: Oho, there's a new A-rating for random write speed? Now that didn't take long time at all!
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From the article:
Except UHS-III never existed and it never will exist. It was immediately supplanted by CFexpress for cameras and later SD express for other devices (like the Switch). There are no UHS-III cards, there are no UHS-III readers.
I’m not sure why Ars keeps repeating the myth that UHS-III exists. Remember the M1 MBP Review that pointlessly put lack of UHS-III support (again, UHS-III doesn’t exist) in the “bad” column?
Just stop.
Except UHS-III never existed and it never will exist. It was immediately supplanted by CFexpress for cameras and later SD express for other devices (like the Switch). There are no UHS-III cards, there are no UHS-III readers.
I’m not sure why Ars keeps repeating the myth that UHS-III exists. Remember the M1 MBP Review that pointlessly put lack of UHS-III support (again, UHS-III doesn’t exist) in the “bad” column?
Just stop.
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This is why microSD express is perfect. There’s only one manufacturer of UHS-II microSD cards I can find (Delkin) and the cards are relatively low capacity compared to the huge UHS-I cards. I’ve also only seen one device that supports such UHS-II microSD cards, the Rog Ally. Since devices largely skipped UHS-II in microSD and SD express is only backcompat with UHS-I, going microSD express makes perfect sense and you lose nothing except money and max capacity (although 1TB isn’t bad).
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There’s no “UHS-3” logo on that card. What’s shown is UHS-I and U3. The latter means it has a guaranteed minimum write speed of 30MB/sec in UHS-I mode.
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So... I currently have an almost-full 1TB card in my Switch.
I didn't realise until this moment that this means that it won't be possible at all for me to just migrate across to a Switch 2. There doesn't seem to be any MicroSD EX cards larger than 256GB out there at all. This sucks.
I didn't realise until this moment that this means that it won't be possible at all for me to just migrate across to a Switch 2. There doesn't seem to be any MicroSD EX cards larger than 256GB out there at all. This sucks.
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They should have come up with their own proprietary memory card format. Worked really well for Sony. /s
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Given that this is a console(that already has USB-C ports) and microSD is...a little mechanically tenuous...for consumer external peripheral applications; I suspect that Nintendo will consider all 'neat stuff' done to the exposed PCIe lane to be attacks; but that won't stop me from considering it neat.
I suspect that an adapter that connects to the microSD slot and handles the initial SD protocol wiggling with a microcontroller so the PCIe device doesn't need to know it has to will be quite doable; it will mostly be a question of how cooperative the host is(n't). Nintendo definitely isn't going to smile on it; but they have historically been a bit behind the curve in terms of full console lockdown; so it would not be a surprise if there's a gap in there somewhere.
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If you want to go there...
iPhone 7 came out just 6 months before Switch, with 32 GB base storage @ $650, and 256 GB max storage, the price difference was $200, more than the cost of a 1 TB SDEx card currently. And that was without expansion. Switch got 32 GB for $300 (half the cost!) AND offered expandability.
iPhone 16 starts at 128 GB, for $800, so almost double the Switch 2 cost for half the storage, with no expandability of storage. Switch 2's 256 GB and expandability really is not bad, even quite good in comparison.
If you want to say that it's a silly comparison, that's kind of the point!
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Pet peeve of mine, but it does not come with 256GB of memory (altho that would be wicked!). It does come with 256GB of storage though.
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Yeah, but how often are you doing massive transfers? It's a trade-off between size (both of the card and the space used by the slot inside the device) and speed. Downloading a big ol' game is going to be limited the internet pipe and that usually can't saturate even a bad drive.
Example, I can sometimes redownload a game on Steam faster than moving it from drive to drive, because I have one dumb Intel SSD that shits itself once the SLC cache is filled, so it flies through the first 8 GB then slows to utter uselessness. But downloading an 80 GB game at 60 MBps (rarely see faster from Steam even wired to the router with gigabit fiber) is handled fine by that drive because it has time to flush the cache.
I see the same thing transferring to the SD card on my Steam Deck: moving games from internal to SD gets the SD card hot and then slow, but downloading (rarely see faster than 40 MBps on the Deck for some reason, even on the same 5 GHz Wifi6 that provides over 100 MBps to my phone) can maintain the max even for pretty big games.
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A) there are already 1TB SDEx cards. There will be more in the near future.
B) you need every single game moved to your [future] Switch 2? Plan on selling the OG?
C) Did you really buy that card with the plan to transfer it to an 8 years (forever in tech time) device, especially a device that was expected to be vastly more powerful? That's silly.
D) It sucks? Could be way worse. There could be zero external storage. It could be something proprietary or semi-propriatary like the XBox Series X expansions. There could be no card slot. There could be no backwards compatibility at all!
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The Switch 2 spec sheet has the following:*microSD memory cards that are not compatible with microSD Express can only be used to copy screenshots and videos from Nintendo Switch.
So it sounds like at least hardware wise it will read microSD other than EX. But yeah whether if you just have Switch 1 games on there it'll work is still an open question.
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It's an informative and timely article. I like it. However I have an editorial objection to the phrasing of this sentence:
If you "increase speed", are you making it transfer faster (i.e. less time) or are you making it take more time (i.e. less transfer rate)? I think I would have preferred it phrased like so:
Edit to add: I see I'm late to the party. Again.
If you "increase speed", are you making it transfer faster (i.e. less time) or are you making it take more time (i.e. less transfer rate)? I think I would have preferred it phrased like so:
Edit to add: I see I'm late to the party. Again.
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Counter pet peeve of mine: Storage is a type of memory. And solid-state storage -- flash memory -- is explicitly defined as NVRAM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-volatile_random-access_memory
This distinction has been further blurred over the years with the introduction of NVDIMMs. While there's still obviously a difference between DRAM and NVRAM, the idea that your SSD isn't "memory" is silly. It very much is. It's non-volatile memory. The phrase "Flash memory" literally has a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
If I had intended to refer to DRAM, I would've said "256GB of RAM," but that wouldn't be awesome -- it'd be wasteful. It'd be the handheld equivalent of buying a bottom-end GPU with a huge VRAM buffer back in the day. There's no point to having that much RAM if the system's memory bandwidth and GPU core aren't big enough to leverage them.
Your pet peeve made more sense when hard drives were mechanical.
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No you cannot. The Wii U is the only Nintendo console to support that. And while we don't know the specs of the 2 USB-C ports on the Switch 2 (I'm assuming some flavor of USB3.) we do know the dock has 2 USB2 USB-A ports. The USB-C port on the dock is most likely power in only.
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