It’s widely expected Nintendo will launch a successor to the Switch in the first quarter of next year and one of the biggest questions surrounding the new hardware is, what are they going to use for storage? The Switch allows you to use pretty much any old microSD card as long as it has a transfer speed of at least 60 MB/s, but if Nintendo aims to bring their games more up to modern standards, that’s probably not going to cut it anymore. That said, the M.2 NVMe SSDs used in next-gen consoles and the Steam Deck may be too hot and power-hungry if Nintendo aims to stick to the slim Switch form factor with their next hardware, so what do they do?
Well, we may have an answer in Samsung’s newly-announced line of SD Express microSD cards. These cards, which will launch with a 256 GB card later this year, to be followed by a 1 TB option, offer 800 MB/s transfer speeds. Perhaps most interesting, Samsung lets slip in their press release that these cards resulted from a “successful collaboration with a customer to create a custom product.”
“For the first time in the industry, Samsung has introduced a new high-performance microSD card based on the SD Express interface. The development was the result of a successful collaboration with a customer to create a custom product.”
Hmmmm! SD Express tech has been around for a while, but adoption has been slow due to cost and there not being a major product that necessarily needs this middle ground between current microSD cards and SSDs. It was a customer asking for a specific solution that spurred this on, and there’s plenty of speculation that customer is Nintendo as the Switch 2 really feels like the ideal fit for these new cards.
If Samsung’s new SD Express tech is indeed going to be in the Switch 2, the 800 MB/s transfer speeds will be around 10x as fast as those of the OG Switch, which could potentially result in, say, backward compatible games loading nearly instantly. That 800 MB/s is still short of the 5,500 MB/s transfer speed of the PS5’s SSD, but if the Switch 2 is aiming for PS4-level power and visual fidelity, perhaps those full SSD speeds aren’t really required.
Of course, take this all with a grain of salt until we get the details from Nintendo themselves. A lot of this is just speculation – maybe the “customer” Samsung is talking about isn’t Nintendo – but regardless, this new product seems to fit the Switch 2 like a glove.
What do you think? What will the Switch 2 use for storage? If it ends up being high-end microSD tech like this, will you be happy?
