When Nintendo revealed the Switch 2 in early April, a new kind of memory card was unveiled to go along with the Switch successor.
The MicroSD Express card is the latest generation of storage cards with read speeds up to 800 MB/s and write speeds of 700 MB/s. These Express cards are so new that only a few companies make them: Lexar, SanDisk, Samsung, and Walmart’s Onn brand.
TeamGroup is the latest company to announce that it will offer MicroSD Express cards. It will make 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB cards, however, TeamGroup didn’t provide a date when they would become available or a price.
Even though the Switch 2 is not even a month old, storage is a big problem looming for console owners that can only be treated with more companies making more MicroSD Express cards to drive the price down.
The Switch 2 storage problem
While the 256 GB built-in storage for the Switch 2 might be plenty for storing games for the original Switch, it will likely fall short in the coming months or year. It comes down to the sizing of the third-party games.
For example, it would only take four Switch 2 launch titles to fill up the built-in storage: Split Fiction (69 GB), Cyberpunk 2077 (59 GB), Hitman World of Assassination: Signature Edition (59 GB), and Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut (53 GB). Other games planned for later this year will likely have similar or even larger file sizes, such as Madden NFL 26, Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition, Borderlands 4, Final Fantasy 7 Remake Integrade, and Star Wars Outlaws.
Games from Nintendo, however, don’t appear to take up as much space as the third-party titles. Mario Kart World comes in at just about 22 GB, and the upcoming Donkey Kong Bananza sits at 8.5 GB.
This means Switch 2 owners will likely have to get themselves a MicroSD Express card sooner rather than later, and they aren’t cheap. Doubling the Switch 2 storage can cost $70-75, and a 1 TB card is around $200 if you decide to go with a Lexar, SanDisk, or Samsung card. Walmart’s Onn brand, however, does come in at about half the price of the other brands. As mentioned earlier, card tests posted on Reddit suggest that the Onn cards appear to be rebranded Lexar cards.