Your Nintendo Switch 2’s 256GB of storage is probably starting to fill up at this point, and with more big games on the horizon, you’re going to need more space if you want to keep all your games handy. Unfortunately, microSD Express cards – the only kind the Switch 2 will load games from – are still tricky to find, but at least there are a couple of budget options available right now, like PNY’s $46.99 (128GB) or $60.99 (256GB) cards.
The 256GB PNY card I tested isn’t the cheapest microSD Express card, even if you get it for three bucks less on Amazon than from PNY directly; that honor goes to the $35.77, 256GB card from Walmart house brand Onn – when you can find it in stock. But it’s still relatively affordable compared to bigger name brands like Lexar or SanDisk selling $200+ cards, and a little better performing, in most ways, versus to the Onn card. And you get the bonus of knowing who the manufacturer is. (Unsurprisingly, the Onn card appears to be a repackaged product from another company.) When it comes to just loading games, doing so from PNY’s card is close to as quick as from the Switch 2’s UFS 3.1 storage, and it’s got better read performance than the Onn card.
Throughput
Storage manufacturers love to tout their cards’ read and write speed, and will promote them using the highest possible numbers. For the PNY card on paper, that’s up to 890MB/s read and up to 750MB/s, both higher numbers than the cheaper Onn card (800MB/s and 600MB/s, respectively). But those numbers don’t tell the whole story, because they’re referring to sequential data transfers, or moving around large single files. We’re more interested in how well it handles random data reads and writes, since games are made up of lots of smaller files. That slows the data transfer process way down, as it has to constantly stop and restart – it doesn’t have enough time per file to gather speed.
Even with drastically reduced random file transfer thoughput, microSD Express is a huge improvement versus old-school microSD. As a point of comparison, transferring the 17.2GB Super Smash Bros Ultimate from my original Switch to the Samsung Evo microSD card I have in it took more than 21 minutes, and moving it back to the Switch’s internal storage took 9.5 minutes. Whereas on my Switch 2, I only waited just under 6 minutes to transfer the game to the PNY card, and 4 minutes to move it back onto the console.
Performance: Load Times
Load times are really where the card’s performance matters most; sure, you might shuffle games around periodically when some big new title comes out, but if you’re anything like me, you only find yourself doing so every few months or so.
The PNY’s card consistently got from the Switch 2 menu to the main screen of games like Donkey Kong Bananza, No Man’s Sky Switch 2 Edition, and Fast Fusion a fraction of a second slower than loading from internal storage. The only outliers here were Mario Kart World, which took about 2 seconds longer than from the Switch 2, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which loaded ever-so-slightly faster than when loading from internal storage (15.46 seconds versus 15.7 seconds).
Performance: File Transfers
I started running into issues with the PNY card during file transfers. The Switch 2 seemingly couldn’t get a handle on how much time was left in each one, so it might say there was a minute left before jumping to four or five minutes when writing larger files. Transfers seemed to gradually get slower on each subsequent test until finally, my Switch 2 stopped reading it at all. It’s possible that was due to issues I had transferring all my game files to the card in the first place – the hub I was using disconnected mid-transfer. One long reformat with a Windows PC later, and the card was much more well-behaved, although it still slowed down near the end of writing large files to it.
With that fresh reformat complete, the PNY card showed better read throughput than the Onn card, averaging between 80MB/s and 90MB/s when transferring Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza to the Switch 2’s internal storage. Its write performance wasn’t quite as impressive, but still a clear improvement over a standard microSD card – transferring the 24.6GB Mario Kart to the card took 7 minutes and 31 seconds (55MB/s), and the 8.6GB Bananza took two minutes and 22 seconds (61MB/s). I saw similar results with older Switch 1 games.
Those write throughput results are on par with, and sometimes slower than, what I saw using the Onn card, despite the PNY’s advertised write speed being 150MB/s higher. But PNY’s card has clearly better read throughput, leading to better game-loading performance and faster file transfers to the system itself. That could be a bigger deal for you, at least if you’re not constantly shuffling files back and forth.
Is Budget microSD Express Worth It?
As I noted in my review of the Onn microSD Express card, how well your microSD Express card performs will vary depending on the card you pick. Digital Foundry ran some tests when the Switch 2 launched, and found that loading games from microSD Express could actually be slightly faster than doing so from the Switch 2’s ostensibly faster UFS 3.1 internal storage. That’s not quite the case for the two cheaper cards I’ve tested, but they’re good enough that you wouldn’t notice a difference without doing direct, A/B comparisons.
Just like the Walmart house brand, you should consider how confident you are that PNY’s slightly-less-budget microSD Express card will last when deciding if you should buy it. My personal experience with cheaper microSD cards and other portable storage has been that they don’t fail unusually quickly under normal use; I had a PNY USB thumb drive in service as a backup storage medium for my Nintendo Wii for 10 years before I finally switched to a hard drive earlier this year. Meanwhile, a 5TB Toshiba hard drive I bought for computer backup purposes gave up the ghost within three years. You just never know.
