Don’t make this common Nintendo Switch 2 mistake – this is the microSD card I use

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Incredible read and write speeds – but only for compatible devices.
• Prices are decent, with a 256GB card costing under $60.
• Very limited support so far, with regular microSD cards being adequate for most applications.

more buying choices

I don’t really game that much nowadays, but one thing that struck me about the press releases surrounding the unveiling of the Nintendo Switch 2 was that it supported microSD Express. In fact, if you want to boost the internal storage of the console, you have to use a microSD Express card. 

Also: The best microSD cards you can buy

While the speeds offered by plain old microSD cards are good enough for most things — microSD cards supporting the V90 video speed class which is 90 MB/s can 8K video at up to 120 frames per second — gaming puts extra pressures on hardware, hence the need for faster cards that can leverage the sort of data bandwidth that PCI Express/NVMe interfaces (which microSD card slots utilize) has to offer.

PNY, a trusted brand when it comes to storage, has come out with microSD Express cards that are up to 4.4x faster than standard UHS-I microSD cards. This means that this tiny card offers up to 890MB/s read speeds and up to 550MB/s write speeds. But fear not, because microSD Express cards are backward compatible with UHS-I and UHS-II host devices at the relevant speeds.

Note that you’ll need a specific microSD Express card reader to get the highest possible speeds from microSD Express cards when using a card reader.

Given these high data transfer speeds, these cards can get hot, so they incorporate thermal monitoring and heat dissipation layers to maximize performance and reliability. It’s a feature that should give you more peace of mind when gaming for hours on end or running graphics-intensive tasks.

Also: What do all those microSD and SD card numbers and letters mean?

Despite the speeds, these cards offer the same durability that regular microSD cards offer, and are shockproof, waterproof, drop proof, X-ray proof, humidity proof, resistant to extremes of temperature, magnetic fields, and are designed to resist physical wear. 

ZDNET’s buying advice

The PNY microSD Express cards come in 128GB and 256GB options, and are reasonably at $44.99 and $55.99, respectively. The cards feature a lifetime limited warranty and come with access to a trial version of PNY’s photo recovery software (you have to pay if you want to recover anything).

If you have a Nintendo Switch 2, I highly recommend these SD cards. For everyone else, whether you’re a photographer or someone who simply wants to add more storage to a device, a standard microSD card will suffice. 

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