microSD Express cards sell out after Switch 2 announcement — more than 337 units sold per hour

Ritsumei2020

Ritsumei2020

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microSD Express cards sell out after Switch 2 announcement — more than 337 units sold per hour

A lot of Nintendo fans are getting ready for the arrival of the Switch 2.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com

The vanilla Lexar 1TB Play microSD card has a regular price of $129.99 on Amazon, but is discounted to $69.99 at the time of writing. This card has a read speed of up to 160 MB/s and a write speed of up to 100 MB/s, which is quite respectable but still not as fast as internal device storage. On the other hand, the microSD Express version of this card has a far faster 900 MB/s read speed and 600 MB/s write speed, making it more than five times quicker than the old standard. It comes at a price, though — the Lexar 1TB Play Pro microSD Express card has an original price of $199.99 on Amazon, and even though it's on sale at $172.63 at the time of writing, it's still more than double the price of the non-Express version.

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Do SD card even sell out? I thought these things were mass produced?
 
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I only got a 256gb one. The prices are absurd. That way, I have a half a TB of space.
 
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SanDisk right now:


xrd-exrd.gif
 
If Nintendo games stay small: (MKW is 22gb and DK is 10gb) then I probably won't bother. 256gb should be enough for first party.

I'm not getting third party on the thing so until it gets hacked and I can use it for emulation etc I won't need more storage.
 
Mownoc said:
If Nintendo games stay small: (MKW is 22gb and DK is 10gb) then I probably won't bother. 256gb should be enough for first party.

I'm not getting third party on the thing so until it gets hacked and I can use it for emulation etc I won't need more storage.
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Yeah I'm very confused about all the supposed storage woes that are making people go out to get these SD cards. The included capacity should be plenty for the first few years.
 
Branded said:
Yeah I'm very confused about all the supposed storage woes that are making people go out to get these SD cards. The included capacity should be plenty for the first few years.
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Some people have to have tons of games installed at the same time for some reason. I know people who will fill up 4tb drives on a PS5.

OFC if you want to play third party games like CoD that will likely fill over a third of your internal storage then yeah, get a card.

For me I'm not likely to have more than around 10 Switch 2 exclusives installed at a time.
 
Branded said:
Yeah I'm very confused about all the supposed storage woes that are making people go out to get these SD cards. The included capacity should be plenty for the first few years.
Click to expand...

Yup. I will pick up a 2TB for ~$100+ when they drop in prices. I have ~100 games installed neatly into folders on my Switch 1 OLED. Imagine I'll end up with a similar number on Switch 2.
 
The prices will comes down over the next couple of years, and they may even increase in speed. For now, I'll rock the internal storage and pick up a 500GB card on Black Friday:
 
Ritsumei2020 said:
Do SD card even sell out? I thought these things were mass produced?
Click to expand...
Regular ones don't, but SD Express is new isn't it? I can't really recall seeing anything other than Switch 2 support it.

I hadn't even heard of these before they were brought up in relation to Switch 2, so there's probably been very low demand until now.
 
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Still can't believe Nintendo is the one responsible for ushering in these fast EX cards. Very thankful! It's painful now but hopefully in a year they'll become standard and prices normalize.
 
AndrewRyan said:
Still can't believe Nintendo is the one responsible for ushering in these fast EX cards. Very thankful! It's painful now but hopefully in a year they'll become standard and prices normalize.
Click to expand...

It was the same with the original Switch when the larger cards arrived. 1TB was expensive but eventually dropped in price. I made it most of the life span with 128GB on Switch until it started to flake out. I eventually got a 512GB card for $20-$25 to replace it.
 
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Ritsumei2020 said:
www.tomshardware.com

microSD Express cards sell out after Switch 2 announcement — more than 337 units sold per hour

A lot of Nintendo fans are getting ready for the arrival of the Switch 2.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com

The vanilla Lexar 1TB Play microSD card has a regular price of $129.99 on Amazon, but is discounted to $69.99 at the time of writing. This card has a read speed of up to 160 MB/s and a write speed of up to 100 MB/s, which is quite respectable but still not as fast as internal device storage. On the other hand, the microSD Express version of this card has a far faster 900 MB/s read speed and 600 MB/s write speed, making it more than five times quicker than the old standard. It comes at a price, though — the Lexar 1TB Play Pro microSD Express card has an original price of $199.99 on Amazon, and even though it's on sale at $172.63 at the time of writing, it's still more than double the price of the non-Express version.

—-

Do SD card even sell out? I thought these things were mass produced?
Click to expand...
Micro SD Express is new and there is only 5 companies manufacturing. But only Lexar has been able to make the 1TB cards. That's why it's been selling out.

And also why they are still expensive. In time the cards should come down in price with more competition in the market.
 
Robb said:
Regular ones don't, but SD Express is new isn't it? I can't really recall seeing anything other than Switch 2 support it.

I hadn't even heard of these before they were brought up in relation to Switch 2, so there's probably been very low demand until now.
Click to expand...

First time I heard of them were from the GameStop leaks!
 
It shows how anti consumer Nintendo is. Asking their customers to buy ridiculously expensive cards because they skimp out on normal storage (512gb minimal).
 
Cyberpunkd said:
If people are stupid enough to pay because a manufacturer went cheap on storage to try to offload the cost to third party…
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In fairness, we've been stuck on UHS-I U3 for far too long, especially after UHS-II fizzled. Nintendo being cheapskates with their internal storage might be the kick in the backside which finally forces the rest of the market to advance.
The only downside I see is the typical fragility of SD cards. Regardless of technology, they still eventually become corrupted. They simply lack the in-built garbage collection/error correction of actual storage.
 
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pro tip. never pay more then 50 bucks for storage.. everything on top is just paying for R&D
 
I remember Sony getting crucified about going with Memory Stick on the PSP and then went proprietary again on the Vita.
 
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tkscz said:
In speeds it's slower than NVMe, but faster than SATA SSD/ SATA M.2 which is extremely faster than HDXC.
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SDX E600 (the fastest SD Express rating) has the same transfer rate as SATA-III, 600 MB/s. Which is pretty impressive, given that the fastest UHS-I U3 cards (like the Sandisk Extreme Pro) only manage about a quarter of that.
 
im only playing MKW, ToT and Odyssey and maybe Mario Party so no need to buy a 1Tb SD card right now, gonna wait Black Friday to get one.
 
Mownoc said:
If Nintendo games stay small: (MKW is 22gb and DK is 10gb) then I probably won't bother. 256gb should be enough for first party.

I'm not getting third party on the thing so until it gets hacked and I can use it for emulation etc I won't need more storage.
Click to expand...
That's me as well, I think for most Nintendo games 256 GB is already good enough, I don't mind deleting something sometimes tho, but maybe prices will go lower when I decide to get one, I'm planning to move all my online gaming to Switch 2 as those games are ported to the system as well
 
Killer8 said:
SanDisk right now:


xrd-exrd.gif
Click to expand...

Right now the Switch 2 is the number one reason why these are selling out. But it also doesn't help matters that the ROG Strix and Steamdeck rely on the same SD cards for additional storage. But yeah, San Disk, Lexar, and the rest are making bank.
 
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