Is any microSD good on the Nintendo Switch? Why can the console be slow?

2023-05-12 20:56:52

Many wonder if it is a problem to put any microSD card in the Nintendo Switch for fear of having a problem with the console’s operation. Fortunately no serious problems will happen, but Nintendo’s console may slow down. In this article you will find out why this happens and find out how much an ideal memory card for the Nintendo Switch costs.

Why can Nintendo Switch be slow depending on the microSD card used?

How to choose a good microSD card for the Nintendo Switch and prevent it from slowing down. Source: unsplash (photo by Samsung Memory)

The great need of the Nintendo Switch to achieve good fluidity in games is the use of a microSD card with constant and high reading and writing speeds. For this, you should look for those that have class U3 (UHS-I) and category A1 at least.

The classes of a microSD card

There are six speed classes that microSD cards are classified into 2,4,6,10, U1 and U3. Classes U1 and U3 are the ones with the highest recording speed (the speed with which a file is copied to the card) in megabytes per second (MB/s).

Classes U1 and U3 support the Ultra High Speed Bus (UHS). The microSD cards coded UHS-I or UHS-II refer to the theoretical maximum speed of the BUS (bus: it is the system that transfers data between components). In the UHS-I cards we have a maximum speed of 104MB/s, while in the UHS-II category there is a maximum speed of 312MB/s.

A1 and A2 categories of a microSD card

The Application Performance Class was created in 2016 by the SD Association due to the need for good performance in applications installed on microSD cards. This classification is made using the letter “A” and a number. The categories indicate the performance of the minimum random read and write speeds (IOPS or input/output operations per second), which are nothing more than the measure of input/output operations per second. Today we only have A1 and A2 standards.

Aplication Performance Class	minimum random read	Minimal random writing	Minimal constant sequential write
Class 1 (A1)	1500 IOPS	500 IOPS	10 Mbytes/s
Class 2 (A2)	4000 IOSP	2000 IOPS	10 Mbytes/s

How will microSD card make Nintendo Switch slower or faster?

According to the PCWorld website, the time for reading and writing game data is not so different from the moment that the micro SD card is category A1 and class U1, the ideal being U3 (UHS-I) with category A1 or A2. Below is a graph of a test to measure the opening speed of a level in Doom on Nintendo Switch (the lower the bar, the better).

Comparison of microSD cards analyzing the time to open the game Doom on Nintendo Switch. Source: pcworld

O site HowToGeek also performed some simple tests to compare the loading time of a save file in different games using microSD cards of different configurations.

Games	internal storage	Micro SD A2	old micro sd
The Outer Worlds	00:46	00:56	01:23
Doom 3	00:09	00:11	00:15

According to HowToGeek, category A2 microSD cards didn’t perform much differently than the Nintendo Switch’s internal storage unit. At the same time, tests shown by PCWorld proved that the A1 category is not too far off either. The big problem of slowness should only happen in older microSD models, which do not have the “Application Performance Class” certification, which only has the A1 and A2 categories, as mentioned above.

How much memory does the Nintendo Switch support?

According to Nintendo, all variants/versions of the Nintendo Switch console support microSD cards up to 2TB. Below is a table showing how much internal memory each version of the Nintendo Switch has, remembering that the user can expand the capacity by adding up to 2 terabytes.