The Switch 2 requires microSD Express for game storage - a standard UHS-I card will not do it, including the one in your original Switch. We track 14 Express cards, from $0.1953 per gigabyte. Matched at the same capacity, Express costs about 61% more per gigabyte than a standard card. That premium is the real cost of the new requirement.
Live prices updated
The Nintendo Switch 2 uses microSD Express for expanded game storage, and does not accept the standard microSD cards that served the original console [source: Nintendo]. This is not a recommendation or a performance preference. It is a hardware requirement, and a card that does not carry the Express designation will not fill the role no matter what speed class it holds.
It is worth being clear about why, because โfaster cardโ undersells it. Standard microSD runs on the UHS-I bus, which the SD specification defines with an interface ceiling of 104MB/s. SD Express is a different electrical interface entirely: it carries PCIe and NVMe - the same protocols an internal solid-state drive uses - over additional contact rows on the back of the card [source: SD Association]. The console is not asking for a quicker version of the old thing. It is asking for a different thing that happens to be the same shape.
Per Nintendo's documented rules, the microSD card from an original Switch cannot be used for Switch 2 game storage. Plan on buying new storage for the new console rather than migrating the card, and treat the old card as storage for the old console or for something else entirely - it has not stopped being a working card.
A new requirement that only one product category can satisfy is a pricing event, and this one has not been quantified anywhere we have seen. So we measured it against our own catalogue: the cheapest in-stock card per gigabyte at each capacity, standard UHS-I against Express.
| Capacity | Standard UHS-I | microSD Express | Express premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| 256GB | $0.1484/GB | $0.1953/GB | +32% |
| 512GB | $0.1367/GB | $0.1976/GB | +45% |
| 1TB | $0.166/GB | $0.3418/GB | +106% |
Across the capacities where we hold both, Express carries a mean premium of 61% per gigabyte. The pattern inside that average matters more than the average: the premium is smallest at the lowest capacity and largest at the highest. Buying a bigger Express card does not get you a better rate the way buying a bigger hard drive does - it gets you a worse one. Anyone budgeting Switch 2 storage on the assumption that capacity gets cheaper in bulk should look at the 1TB row first.
Comparing the average price per gigabyte of all Express cards against all standard cards in our catalogue returns MINUS 9% - Express looking cheaper than UHS-I, which is plainly wrong. It happens because every Express card sold is 256GB or larger, while standard cards include a long tail of small ones that cost a great deal per gigabyte. The unmatched average measures which capacities each format sells in, not what the bus costs. Matched at the same capacity, the premium is unambiguous. This is the same discipline behind every percentage on this site: compare like with like, or end up measuring your own catalogue.
Express cards advertise large read figures - 900MB/s appears on several of the cards above. Those are the manufacturer's own numbers, and on the Express bus they are far more plausible than the equivalent claims on UHS-I, because the bus can actually carry them. But they still describe peak sequential read under the maker's test conditions, not what a console does when it loads a game.
Figures above roughly 104MB/s on a UHS-I card are the manufacturer's own claim and depend on a proprietary reader: the UHS-I bus itself is specified to 104MB/s, so a standard card reader or a camera will not reach them.
The specification that carries a guarantee is the certification mark, and every card here clears what the console requires. Beyond that, the honest advice is to buy on cost per gigabyte from a brand you recognise - which is exactly what the table above ranks on.
If you own a Switch 2 and are running out of internal storage, you need an Express card and there is no way around it. The question is only which capacity, and the premium data above argues for buying what you need now rather than over-provisioning: this is a young format at early-market pricing, produced in volumes a fraction of standard microSD, and the cost per gigabyte at the top capacities reflects that rather than any technical necessity.
If you are still deciding between consoles, the storage cost is a real line item that the hardware price does not include. Our microSD hub carries the wider market, and spot-the-fake matters more here than in most categories: a new, expensive, in-demand format with a captive audience is exactly the condition counterfeiters look for.
It is worth stepping back from the console for a moment, because the Switch 2 has done something to microSD Express that seven years of specification work did not. The format was published in 2018 and spent most of the time since as a line item in the SD standard that almost nobody manufactured, because there was no device that required it and therefore no volume to justify producing it. Cards existed in the way that reference designs exist.
A single mass-market console changed that overnight, and the prices on this page are what the first year of a real market looks like: several manufacturers producing at small scale into demand they cannot yet predict, with no established price expectation to anchor against. The premium over UHS-I is not a permanent property of the technology. It is what a young format costs while it is young.
That has a practical implication for anyone deciding how much storage to buy now. The argument for over-provisioning - buy the biggest card, avoid buying twice - is weaker here than it would be for a hard drive, because the per-gigabyte cost at the top capacities is currently at its least favourable and the format is at the point in its life where prices typically move. Buying what the next year needs, rather than what the console's lifetime might, is the position our own numbers support.
Not for games. Nintendo documents that the Switch 2 requires microSD Express for game storage, and a standard UHS-I card - which is what every original Switch card is - will not serve that purpose. The console can still read older cards for some content, but the storage you expand games onto has to be Express. This is the sharpest generational break the format has had.
Measured against our own catalogue, matched at the same capacity, Express costs about 61% more per gigabyte than a standard UHS-I card. The gap widens as capacity rises - the table on this page shows it per capacity. That is the real cost of the new requirement, and it is a bigger number than the launch coverage suggested.
It is different hardware, not a premium badge. SD Express carries PCIe and NVMe - the protocols an internal SSD uses - over extra contact rows on the back of the card, which requires a different controller and a different manufacturing process. The format also has almost no volume history: it was specified years ago and went essentially unused until a console required it, so it is being produced at early-market scale while UHS-I is produced at decades of scale.
Buy for the size of the library you actually keep installed rather than the one you might. Express cards carry a real premium per gigabyte, and unlike a hard drive there is no meaningful discount for going large - our own figures show the premium getting WORSE at 1TB, not better. Two smaller cards swapped between games is a legitimate strategy on a handheld in a way it is not on a desktop.
We do not publish load-time measurements because we do not run a test lab, and anyone quoting them should tell you how they measured. What we can state is the specification: all these cards clear the Express bus requirement the console sets, and the advertised MB/s differences between them are manufacturer claims. The certification marks are the part that carries a guarantee.
They are SanDisk-made cards with Nintendo branding and a licence fee attached, and our capacity-matched comparison of licensed against unlicensed cards shows a real premium at most capacities - though not all, which is why we would check the current figure rather than assume. The licence buys artwork and guaranteed compatibility messaging, not different flash.
Nintendo's own support documentation, which is linked inline on this page. We cite the platform holder directly rather than reporting a specification second-hand, because compatibility claims about a console are exactly the thing that gets garbled in aggregation.