The Switch continued to be a huge hit for Nintendo with a string of hit titles like Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but the hybrid console has its downsides. Probably most annoying is that the console only has 25.9 GB of user-accessible space, which makes it difficult to install multiple eShop games at the same time. In fact, some titles like NBA 2K19 do not fit on internal memory at all!
Luckily, Nintendo has included a Micro SD slot in the Switch, allowing you to bypass those storage limits by simply inserting a widely available Micro SD card. If you’re considering this essential upgrade, there are a few obvious questions: which Switch memory card should you choose, and how fast will Micro SD storage be compared to running from a physical game cartridge or the internal memory of the Switch?
To answer these questions, we’ll recommend the best Switch Micro SD cards on the market in 2022, among some absolute units that can hold up to 1TB, as well as cheaper cards that strike the best balance between price and performance. Whatever capacity you’re considering, we’ve got a great recommendation that will meet your needs. You might be surprised to find that higher capacity cards have become much more affordable recently, giving 512GB cards a new relevance.
We’ll also share the results of our research on Switch game load times, so you can know where to install your favorite games, and we’ll explain the best way to move install data from your Switch’s internal memory to the Micro SD card and vice versa. As the data reveals, our Micro SD card picks actually offer slightly faster load times than actual physical cartridges – something to remember if you’re considering a shopping cart or digital download. Without further ado, let’s get to the recommendations!
Best Micro SD Switch UK Cards
For UK buyers, there’s been something of a shift as 512GB cards now offer the best value per gigabyte, with 128GB and 256GB options coming close behind. There’s also a new 1TB card from Amazon themselves, which has garnered great reviews and is considerably cheaper than anything we’ve seen from Integral or SanDisk.
Best Switch USA Micro SD Cards
Our US recommendations are slightly different, as there are more brands represented on Amazon.com than on its sister sites. We’ve selected four cards from a few different companies, all of which are excellent value for money and come with positive customer reviews. Interestingly, the 512GB cards have now more or less hit the sweet spot of capacity per dollar, so if you’re looking for a card that will last a long time before filling up, these are great choices. Our new 1TB pick, the Lexar Play Micro SD card, is also almost as cheap as smaller cards, something we haven’t seen before.
The Switch supported Micro SD cards up to 32GB at launch, but a software update soon after pushed that limit up to 2TB. At present, we don’t have anything close. 2TB card outside of a secret lab, but massive 512GB cards are getting relatively affordable and even 1TB cards are starting to make sense. The most important point here is that the more space you have, the more games you can install on the card and the less time you have to spend deleting or redownloading games. Therefore, our recommendation is that you get the largest Micro SD card you can afford, although our recommendations also include the best deals based on GDP or USD per gigabyte calculations.
Of course, capacity is only half of the equation – what about speed? Well, here the Switch is not so upgradeable. The console only supports UHS-1 cards, which have a maximum possible speed of 104MB/s, compared to the 312MB/s speed limit of the more modern UHS-2 standard. However, our testing revealed only a tiny gap between the slowest and fastest UHS-1 Micro SD cards on the Switch, so our recommendations are geared towards capacity and value rather than speed. .
In addition to testing different Micro SD cards, we also looked at two other options for playing Switch games: using internal storage and playing directly from the game cartridge. To get a clear idea of the fastest storage method in different situations, we took perfect loading time records of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. We tested both starting the game and moving quickly between areas, and the results were surprising – you’d think Nintendo’s own cartridges would offer the best load times, but that’s not the case. ..
| Zelda/Switch loading times | Cartridge | Internal storage | Sandisk 16 GB Ultra SDHC | Sandisk 64GB Extreme SDXC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Temple of Time (initial load) | 35.7 | 30.7 | 34.1 | 34.4 |
| Kakariko Village (initial load) | 27.0 | 24.1 | 26.3 | 26.6 |
| Owa Daim Shrine (initial load) | 9.5 | 8.7 | 9.3 | 9.3 |
| Tour of the Grand Plateau (Travel) | 32.6 | 27.7 | 30.9 | 31.2 |
| Dueling Peaks Tour (Travel) | 20.5 | 18.8 | 19.8 | 20.1 |
| Resurrection Shrine (Voyage) | 24.2 | 21.8 | 23.0 | 23.8 |
In each test, we got the same hierarchy of results: reading from the game cartridge was the slowest method, while internal storage was the fastest. The two Micro SD cards we tested offered near-identical times, a little faster than the cartridge but slower than the internal storage, sometimes by an appreciable margin. For example, in our Temple of Time load test, the internal storage was five seconds faster than the cartridge and four seconds faster than either Micro SD card. This means that if you absolutely want to minimize game loading times, then installing your most played games to the Switch’s internal memory is a wise move.
To note: These tests were done before Nintendo added a so-called “boost mode” to Breath of the Wild, which pushes the Switch’s processor to its limits to speed up the loading process when you first enter a game. or you move to a new area. However, the hierarchy of the different storage methods remains the same.
Now that you have installed your selected Micro SD card, how to move switch games to micro sd? Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to move game installation data directly from the Switch’s internal memory to a Micro SD card. Instead, you have to follow a mysterious set of instructions to archive the software and then download it again.
Start by visiting System Parametersby selecting Data management and then Manage Software. Then select the game you want to transfer, then select Archiving softwareso Archive. Now insert your Micro SD card, return to the home screen and select the archived game. Select Download and the game will be downloaded to your Micro SD card. Your save data won’t be affected (it’s stored in the Switch’s internal memory), but you’ll have to wait for the download to complete, which can be a pain for those with slower internet connections. If you want to move games to your internal storage, follow the same steps but remove the Micro SD card before downloading your game to ensure it’s installed on the Switch’s flash memory.
To sum up, the fastest storage option is the 32GB of space that makes up the Switch’s internal flash memory, so use that for your most-played games using the method outlined above if loading speeds the fastest are your priority. Micro SD cards are next, offering comparable speeds and much larger capacities. When it comes to choosing the best Micro SD card, our advice would be to first choose a reputable brand (no-name cards are best avoided, especially when good brands like Samsung, SanDisk and Kingston are reasonably priced) . Second, as long as you’re configured with a UHS-1 card, you can afford to largely ignore read and write speeds and instead focus on choosing the highest capacity you can afford. , because our tests did not reveal any significant reality. advantage for higher performance cards.
