The best microSD cards for the Nintendo Switch 2

The Nintendo Switch 2 is here, and that means a whole lot more people will eventually need a new microSD card. While the new console comes with 256GB of built-in storage — eight times more than the original Switch and four times more than the Switch OLED — its improved performance means that some games will chew up a ton of that space. Cyberpunk 2077 is a 59GB download, for example, while Split Fiction checks in at 69GB. Other titles aren’t nearly as big (particularly those made by Nintendo itself), but chances are you’ll want to add more room at some point down the road.

Whenever that is, you’ll need a microSD Express card. This is not the same as the old reliable microSD cards you may have bought for the first Switch or other gaming handhelds — they’re newer, faster and far more expensive. But if you want more space, they’re your only choice. If you’re looking to grab one today, we’ve laid out the best microSD cards for the Switch 2 and broken down what you should know before you buy.

The best microSD cards for the Switch 2 (aren’t all that important)

The Switch 2 is the first mainstream device to require microSD Express for storage expansion, so there aren’t many options available to buy just yet. Of the six compatible models we’ve seen thus far, we’ve tested five: the SanDisk microSD Express Card, the Lexar Play Pro, the Samsung microSD Card for Nintendo Switch 2, the PNY microSD Express Card and the GameStop Express microSD Card for Nintendo Switch 2. The first four are made by genuine storage manufacturers, while the GameStop card appears to be a rebadged version of another model. (This should be the case with another card sold by Walmart under its Onn sub-brand, which we hope to catch in stock before our next update.) We used the 256GB version of every card except for Lexar Play Pro, which was 1TB.

After timing these microSD Express cards across a range of Switch 2 games, our advice is simple: Get whichever one is available for the lowest price in the capacity you want. They aren’t identical, especially if you want to move a game to the card from the console’s internal storage (or vice versa). But the differences in load times and overall performance within actual games are tough to notice unless you have a stopwatch handy.

All five cards loaded up the digital version of Mario Kart World, for instance, between 18 and 20 seconds. Each loaded the first Grand Prix race in about 6.5 seconds. Getting to the start screen of Cyberpunk 2077 took about 38 seconds in each case. Loading a save in a particularly asset-heavy area (Jig-Jig Street) then took between 26 and 29 seconds, depending on the card.

With Fast Fusion, a smaller native Switch 2 game, the initial load always took six to seven seconds, while each card loaded the first championship race in roughly 4 seconds. It was a similar situation with the Switch 2 upgrade for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (using a Switch 1 cartridge): Each card took just over six seconds to get to the start screen, between 19 and 20 seconds to load a save just before the final boss, about 16 seconds to fast travel between Kakariko Village and Korok Forest, and so on. We saw no significant issues with in-game loads when playing each game, either.

All of this suggests that the Switch 2 has a relatively specific target for these cards to hit, and that there may not be much room for one model to leap too far out in front of the others. We’ll also note that the console’s built-in storage was consistently faster than any external option: The gap wasn’t always big, but no card truly outpaced it in any of our tests. Loading that demanding area in Cyberpunk, for example, took about 22.5 seconds on average. So if you want the absolute fastest load times, don’t put your game on a card at all.

If you need the mental comfort of knowing you technically have the best card available, get the SanDisk microSD Express Card. It had no outliers across our many game loading tests, and it was consistently right near the top when it came to moving games to and from system storage, which means it offers strong sequential read and write performance. Benchmark testing on PC with tools like CrystalDiskMark backed this up, as noted in our broader microSD card buying guide.

Putting Mario Kart (a 21.9GB file) on that card took four minutes and 39 seconds on average, which was only second to the Lexar Play Pro by six seconds. It was the fastest to write Fast Fusion (3.5GB), taking an average of 27 seconds across three runs. Only PNY’s card was faster to move games back to the console’s storage, but that one was far slower at writing games to the card — getting Mario Kart on there took seven minutes and 11 seconds on average. Just note that the 128GB version of SanDisk’s card has slower sequential writes than the larger versions, including much slower sustained write speeds (100 MB/s vs 210-220 MB/s). So transferring a game to that particular model will take much longer.

Practically speaking, though, speed differences aren’t as important in this case as having lots of space to hold games at a price you can live with. To make things easy, we’ve listed every Express card we’ve seen at retailers at the time of writing below. Remember: You want microSD Express, not “Extreme,” like the branding SanDisk uses for some conventional microSD cards. A microSD Express card will have a big “EX” logo printed on it.

128GB

• SanDisk microSD Express Card ($60 MSRP)

• PNY microSD Express Card ($47 MSRP)

256GB

512GB

1TB

• Lexar Play Pro ($220 MSRP)

• GameStop Express microSD Card for Nintendo Switch 2 ($190 MSRP)

As you can see, while the SanDisk card is fast, it’s also the most expensive of an already-pricey bunch. Is it worth an extra $10-20 to shave a couple seconds off certain loads in certain games, or a couple minutes when moving a game to external storage? Probably not for most people.

But stock for all of these cards has been patchy since the Switch 2 landed, especially for the Walmart Onn model, which is by far the cheapest choice. If only one card is actually available by the time you read this — and you must have it today — it’s safe to just get it. You won’t lose or gain all that much when it comes to real-world performance.

Ultimately, though, we advise holding off on buying any microSD Express card for as long as possible. President Trump’s tariff shenanigans could spike prices a little higher in the short term, but in general, all of these cards are about as expensive today as they’ll ever be. And compared to traditional microSD options, they are pricey: The Samsung Pro Plus, for example, costs $17 for 128GB, $25 for 256GB, $43 for 512GB and $90 for 1TB as of this writing.

The Switch 2 is extremely popular, so more microSD Express cards will need to be made and prices will (eventually) come down. Ideally, we’ll see more high-capacity options as well: Nintendo says the Switch 2 technically supports cards up to 2TB, but so far only a couple even go up to 1TB. All of this means you should try to use all 256GB baked into the Switch 2 first, even if it means having to delete a game or two. But if you absolutely need more space right away, the cards above should be fine.

What are microSD Express cards?

Most microSD cards are based on a standard called Ultra High Speed (UHS), of which there are three versions: UHS-I, UHS-II and UHS-III. The vast majority of cards you may have bought in the past utilize UHS-I. These have one row of pins in the back and a theoretical maximum data transfer speed of 104 megabytes per second (MB/s). (Though many cards are able to surpass that limit with proprietary tech and card readers.) The original Switch has a UHS-I microSD slot, as do most other gaming handhelds like Valve’s Steam Deck.

UHS-II cards add a second row of pins and can reach up to 312 MB/s. These are pricier and much less common than cards based on UHS-I, but they’re supported by some cameras and higher-power handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally X. UHS-III, meanwhile, is twice as fast as UHS-II in theory (624 MB/s), but no microSD cards have actually used it.

UHS-I cards have held on over the years because they’re cheap, widely supported and fast enough for the things most people need them to do: record 4K video, stash photos and so on. But with the Switch 2, Nintendo needs more. The new console is dramatically more powerful, which allows it to run demanding games that may have originally been built for stronger hardware like the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X or gaming PCs. The device also uses UFS 3.1 storage internally, which is much speedier than the eMMC storage used by the original Switch. (A custom file decompression engine helps improve load times as well.) So if the Switch 2 is going to accept microSD cards, it needs ones that won’t bring a serious drop-off in performance and can hold up with modern games.

Hence, SD Express. This standard has technically been around since 2018 but mostly went nowhere until the Switch 2 came along. It also uses a second row of pins, but it lets microSD cards take advantage of the PCI Express (PCIe)/NVMe interface, which is the same underlying tech used by modern SSDs. As a result, it can produce considerably faster read and write speeds, with a current theoretical maximum of 985 MB/s.

As noted above, real-world performance won’t be quite that fast. Even if it was, the best microSD Express cards would still be much slower than the NVMe SSDs used by the PS5 and Xbox. (Sony recommends SSDs with sequential read speeds of at least 5,500 MB/s.) And they’ll fall well below their peak speeds under sustained loads: SanDisk, for instance, says sustained write speeds for its 128GB Express card can drop as low as 100 MB/s.

But they’re still a marked improvement over old UHS-I cards, and in theory, they should be quicker than some older SATA-based SSDs when it comes loading game levels, asset streaming, retrieving saves or copying games to external storage. Whereas SanDisk’s microSD Express card can produce sequential read speeds around 900 MB/s, Lexar’s Professional Silver Plus — the top UHS-I pick in our general microSD card guide — topped out just over 200 MB/s, and that’s with a proprietary reader. (On the first Switch, it’d be closer to 100 MB/s.) Sequential writes and random speeds were three to four times better as well, and sometimes even more depending on the benchmark we used.

It remains to be seen how well these Express cards will hold up with years of use, and there’s no way to know exactly when their sky-high prices will drop. Non-Switch 2 devices that support microSD Express are still exceedingly rare, and the standard itself isn’t backwards compatible with UHS-II, so you’ll be limited to UHS-I speeds if you want to use your card with another device (unless you buy a pricey external reader). Still, while the increased costs and limited selection are annoying, the tech itself is worthy of a next-gen Switch.

How we test microSD Express cards

We put our microSD Express cards through a series of tests meant to simulate how people would use each card on the Switch 2 in the real world. We mainly worked with four games: a mid-sized title in Mario Kart World, a small one in Fast Fusion, a relatively large one in Cyberpunk 2077 and a hybrid in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which ran off a Switch 1 cartridge but used a roughly 10GB Switch 2 upgrade pack that was downloaded and installed digitally.

We first timed how long it took to move each game from the system’s internal storage to the card in question, and vice versa. We then timed how long it took to load each game when installed to a given card. After that, we measured how quickly the cards could load certain in-game scenarios: the first Grand Prix race in Mario Kart; the first championship race in Fast Fusion; fast traveling between the Jig-Jig Street, Embers and Downtown Central areas in Cyberpunk and fast traveling between the Kakariko Village, Korok Forest and the Hyrule Castle Town Ruins areas in Zelda. (We chose those places in the latter two games because they’re more taxing than other regions.) With Cyberpunk and Zelda, we also timed how long it took to load up different save files in those locations.

With each test, we completed three to five runs to account for any irregularities and marked down the average time taken between them. We did each test in airplane mode, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off, to minimize any performance drain that could arise from background downloads. Between each test, we also spent at least an hour playing the games off each card to ensure there were no significant drop-offs compared to the console’s built-in storage.