Samsung's official Super Mario microSD Express Card is currently on sale, but I recommend you avoid its alluring, flashy ways. Look, I get it. As someone who adores officially licensed Nintendo tech, I understand that the cute Fire Flower art is hard to ignore. But picking it up right now means spending more than you should.
The official Super Mario SD card is currently $149.99, down from its usual $199.99 at Amazon. However, you can get the same 512GB worth of storage for your Switch 2 by paying just $99.99 at Amazon instead with Samsung's P9 alternative. With it you'd be saving $50 of your hard-earned cash, and all you need to do is set aside your "all my tech must be cute" thought processes. Easy peasy.
There are actually differences besides looks between SanDisk and Samsung's 512GB-sized cards, and that's where their speeds are concerned. The SanDisk card, which sits at $149.99 at Amazon today, boasts it can deliver read speeds of up to 880 MB/s and write speeds up to 650 MB/s. Meanwhile, the official Samsung online store states its 512GB capacity card provides sequential read speeds of 800 MB/s instead. That means the SanDisk option is the faster option, but as someone who tests game storage, I can attest that these differences are going to be extremely minor in practice.
Take the Samsung 256GB microSD Express Card that I reviewed last year, another 800 MB/Ss card, for example. Mario Kart World took 22 seconds on average to load from the card to its title screen during testing. Meanwhile, the 1TB PNY microSD Express Card took 20.39 seconds with its faster 890MB/s read speeds. In practice, the faster card was only a few seconds ahead, and it was barely noticeable.
While the Fire Flower-branded card is faster, there's only going to be a few seconds' worth of difference. I'd much sooner recommend you pick up the cheaper card and save $50, even if it's the technically slower choice.
- View all Switch 2 microSD Express Cards at Amazon
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