A new Nintendo job listing may give clues on what to expect from the Switch 2’s storage speeds.
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Nintendo’s new Switch successor could use high-end micro SD storage tech to deliver better gameplay experiences. As spotted by YouTuber SuperMetalDave64, Nintendo of America is currently hiring a PCB layout engineer and they’d like the candidate to have experience with SD Express flash storage.
What’s SD Express? It’s a relatively new spec that allows Micro SD cards to deliver up to 985 MB/sec speeds. That’s a much higher rate than the current-gen Switch, and better speeds will be instrumental in delivering the higher-resolution assets in new Switch 2 games. In February of this year, Samsung announced its line of SD Express cards that are capable of up to 800MB/sec speeds.
Samsung details its 256GB SD Express microSD cards in a press release from earlier this year:
Thanks to its low-power design as well as firmware technology optimized for high-performance and thermal management, Samsung’s SD Express microSD card offers performance equivalent to SSDs in a small form factor.
While read speeds for traditional microSD cards based on the UHS-1 interface were limited to 104MB/s, SD Express was able to boost it to 985MB/s, although commercial availability of the latter were not viable in microSD cards until now.
The sequential read speed of Samsung’s SD Express microSD card reaches up to 800MB/s – 1.4 times faster than SATA SSDs (up to 560 MB/s) and more than four times faster compared to traditional UHS-1 memory cards (up to 200 MB/s).
The speculation is that the Switch 2 will be compatible with SD Express storage based on the job listing.
If accurate, this essentially means that the Switch 2 will be able to use much higher-end storage solutions, leading to faster loading times as well as potentially better gameplay from SD-installed games through faster asset streaming.
Here’s more technical info on SD Express directly from the SD Association:
SD Express and microSD Express add the popular PCI Express® and NVMe™ interfaces to SD memory cards alongside the legacy SD interface. The PCIe interface delivers a 985 megabytes per second (MB/s) maximum data transfer rate and the NVMe upper layer protocol enables advanced memory access mechanism. All SD Express memory cards are backwards compatible while still benefiting from continued research, development and long-term roadmaps associated with these two architectures. Soon, SD Express memory cards will be able to serve as removable Solid State Drives(SSD).
SD Express and microSD Express maintain the long-standing advantage of SD’s backward compatibility and interoperability. The PCIe interface was added, in addition to the existing SD (UHS-I) interface, allowing a card with SD Express to operate interchangeably in new SD Express capable hosts as well as with billions of existing SD host products in the market today.
The speeds delivered by SD Express are essential for high-resolution content applications such as: super-slow motion video, RAW continuous burst mode photography, 8K video capture and playback, 360-degree photo, 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR). The high speeds capabilities are also essential with speed hungry applications running on cards and mobile computing devices, ever-evolving gaming systems, multi-channel Internet-Of-Things (IoT) devices, numerous automotive storage needs, and other applications that require high performance removable memory cards.
SD Express was introduced as part of the SD 7.0 specification and microSD Express was introduced as part of the SD 7.1 specification. SD Express and microSD Express will be available in SDHC, SDXC and SDUC capacities ranging from plus 2GB to 128 TB.