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This is possible with a steady hand, a sufficiently dinky screwdriver, and a willingness to ignore Valve's advice, but compatible M.2 2230 SSDs are both rarer and more expensive than microSD cards.

Nintendo switch sd card slot upgrade#

That’s one of the reasons why, in a break from gaming PC orthodoxy, it’s generally better to just buy expandable storage for the Steam Deck rather than try to upgrade its own internal drive. You might be surprised how well these Flash cards can keep pace with the Deck’s internal SSD, despite Valve not even choosing a particularly high-spec interface for the microSD card slot (like Asus did for the ROG Ally). Just like SSDs, each microSD card will perform differently, so to determine which are the best ones I have performed a science and measured how quick they are in a number of game booting and loading benchmarks. Looking for more RPS recommended hardware? I ambushed Liam with Etsy's strangest Steam Deck accessories. There are plenty of useful Steam Deck accessories but none of them make such a fundamental improvement as the extra storage space of a microSD – especially if you’ve got the 64GB Steam Deck model, or just happen to be a fan of the modern AAA stuff that regularly gobbles up 100GB-plus for installs. Look for A2 microSD cards at Best Buy, Target, Samsung's online store, or really anywhere else.The best microSD cards for the Steam Deck should really the first and foremost way to treat your handheld PC to extra hardware. I would recommend you don't purchase a card through Amazon, since counterfeit cards (which either stop working or have sub-par speeds) are still an ongoing problem. The next time you buy an SD card for a Nintendo Switch, or really anything that will use the card for running apps or games, make sure it's an A2 card. If you notice faster loading times or generally snappier performance, it might be time to replace the card. If you're not sure, go to your Switch's settings, move a game from your SD back to the internal storage, and try playing it for a while. On the other hand, using an old or extremely cheap microSD card in your Switch - especially one without any UHS (Ultra High Speed) rating - could very well be acting as a bottleneck for your Switch's performance.

If you need to buy a new SD card anyway, the speed is definitely something you should consider. Some games will load 2-3 seconds faster, but that's about it. If you already have an A1 card, or even one of the more basic UHS-I cards sold by SanDisk with Nintendo branding, you probably don't need to toss it out and buy a new SD card right this second. Other games might be bottlenecked by the Switch's aging processor and graphics, rather than the storage medium. Games with smaller levels, like Doom 3, don't need to load as much data at once, so the drive speed isn't as important. In other games, the difference between a fast and reasonably-slow SD card is only a few seconds. The older SD card pushed loading times to 67% slower than the Switch's internal storage. The most significant difference was the 22% slowdown with loading a save file in The Outer Worlds, which makes sense - that's an open world game that needs to load many textures and other assets from storage, so fast read speeds are critical.

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Disk benchmarks were tested with an Anker USB-C hub and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on an M1 Mac Mini.īroadly speaking, loading games from the SanDisk A2 card wasn't significantly different than the internal storage.

All tests were conducted with identical save profiles on a Nintendo Switch OLED Edition running in handheld mode. Notes: The test for The Outer Worlds was with the cartridge version, but that requires a large amount of the game to be downloaded. The NVMe storage used in newer PCs and game consoles blow that out of the water, often pushing 7,000 MB/s. That's faster than most USB flash drives, but less than half the read and write speeds of a typical SATA internal SSD - the Samsung 870 EVO maxes out at around 560 MB/s.

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For example, Samsung's new line of Pro Plus microSD cards have read speeds of up to 180 MB/s and write speeds of up to 130 MB/s. The main problem with SD cards is performance - even the fastest SD and microSD cards have a fraction of the read and write speeds of other flash storage.

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Once you have a microSD card, you can download new games or game data directly to the SD card, or you can move data back and forth as needed between internal and SD storage. That might only leave you enough room for a handful of games, which is why the Switch also has a slot for microSD cards up to 2 TB in size. Nintendo Switch and Switch Lite consoles have 32 GB of internal storage, with the OLED model bumping that up to 64 GB, but the operating system eats up some space on all models.