Japan Out of MicroSD Express Memory Cards as Resellers Prepare for Switch 2 Release

According to online sources, microSD Express memory cards have sold out at e-commerce stores across Japan after Nintendo confirmed that the company’s Switch 2 handheld console supports the cards. Interestingly, microSD Express cards, which have significantly faster read/write speeds than regular microSD cards, are in short supply because vendors have had no reason to produce them.

Image source: Nintendo

Common SD card formats like SDHC, SDXC, UHS-I, and UHS-II, which the original Nintendo Switch supports, offer read speeds of 10 to 90 MBps. Meanwhile, the move from the standard SD interface to PCIe allows microSD Express cards to offer read speeds of up to 900 MBps. That’s not as fast as NVMe SSDs, but it’s still faster than SATA drives.

Manufacturers ignored the SD Express standard, which was introduced in 2018, for years because traditional memory cards are much cheaper and fast enough for most tasks. Even running mobile apps and recording 4K video doesn’t require speeds higher than 30-60 Mbps.

However, modern games require a higher speed to run, so Nintendo decided to use the standard to reduce game loading times. The company demonstrated the difference during a livestream, when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Switch 2 loaded a scene in about 5 seconds, while on the original Switch it took about 13 seconds.

Image source: techspot.com

If you search for microSD Express cards on Amazon, for example, you’ll see that currently only SanDisk and Lexar offer such cards. In the case of SanDisk, the 128GB and 256GB cards are available for $50 and $60, respectively. In the case of Lexar cards, the 256GB model costs $50, and the 512GB model costs $100.

Samsung and Western Digital confirmed plans to release microSD Express cards last year. Samsung said an unnamed partner is preparing to release a “consumer” device with microSD Express, and it’s likely Nintendo is the one in question. The memory card will come in handy for Switch 2 users, as third-party games can quickly eat up the console’s 256GB of internal storage.