Summary
The Nintendo Switch 2 is right around the corner, but once it’s time to upgrade your storage, not any microSD card will suffice. You’ll need a microSD Express card, which are currently rare, but they’re slowly growing. Now, PNY is launching its own offering to the ring.
PNY, one of the biggest players in the SD card space, is launching its very first microSD Express offering. According to PNY, the cards offer read speeds of up to 890 MB/s and write speeds of up to 750 MB/s, or in other words, up to 4.4 times faster than traditional UHS-I microSD cards. Not bad. microSD Express cards have a theoretical maximum speed limit of 985 MB/s, so this gets pretty close to what the perfect microSD Express card would be.
We have a whole explainer onmicroSD Expressand how it’s way different from regular microSD cards. But in case you need a refresher, microSD Express cards use PCIe and NVMe technologies, the same interfaces used by high-speed solid-state drives (SSDs). These cards have additional contacts, but they’re putting those additional contacts to good use, because this is basically just a tiny NVMe SSD. These are perfect for devices where the bandwidth in regular microSD cards and ports is simply not enough for data transfer purposes.
microSD Express cards keep a degree of backwards compatibility with older ports—with considerably slower speeds, mind you—but some devices will need a microSD Express card and will refuse other cards. The Nintendo Switch 2, due for release soon, takes only microSD Express cards, since it wants to maximize the bandwidth to prevent performance issues on games stored in the console’s external storage. This has led to increased demand for a standard that was otherwise slowly but steadily making its way to more devices, so manufacturers are scrambling to release their takes on microSD Express. PNY is just the latest company to join this list.
PNY is initially offering the microSD Express cards in two capacities: 128 GB and 256 GB. These aren’t the biggest sizes, as there are some regular microSD cards going up to 2TB, but it should be good for moving over some of your game library in a pinch.
The PNY microSD Express Flash Memory Cards are available for purchase now throughPNY’s official website. You might not love the price, though. The 128 GB model is $44.99, and the 256 GB model is priced at $55.99. For less than this, you can get a 512 GB regular microSD card, and you can go up to 1 TB if you put a tad more money. Really, what you’re paying for here is the speeds, though as more manufacturers release their own microSD Express cards and they start to become mainstream, the price will certainly go down. Get yours now before your Nintendo Switch 2 ships so you’re ready to go.
