SanDisk and Samsung Nintendo Switch 2 microSD Express cards hit all-time low prices on Amazon for Black Friday — add 512GB of storage to your console for less

The maelstrom that is Black Friday is upon us. The biggest sales event of the year lasts almost a whole month these days, and is one of the best times to snag a deal or five. One of the most popular items on shoppers' lists if you're a Nintendo Switch 2 owner is a new microSD Express card. This 512GB SanDisk microSD Express card is only $89.24 at Amazon, a 15% price cut from its $104.99 list price and a new low on Amazon. You can also pick up the slightly cheaper Samsung P9 512GB microSD Express for just $74.99, a 25% reduction from its $99.99 price.

• Grab this SanDisk deal at Amazon
• Grab this Samsung deal at Amazon

In comparison to the Nintendo Switch 2's launch, there is now plenty of stock of these microSD cards, with Samsung's P9 Express only releasing onto the market fairly recently. With these sales and the festive holidays on the near horizon, this is a great opportunity to snap one of these cards up early as a stocking filler.

SanDisk's microSD card can deliver impressive read speeds of up to 880MB/s and write speeds of up to 650MB/s, with a sustained write speed of 220MB/s. The new microSD Express cards are required for the Nintendo Switch 2 console, due to the much faster transfer speeds over standard microSDXC cards. This allows games to install, load, and stream data much faster, for a better gameplay and user experience.

Although these tiny SD cards pale in size to an M.2 SSD (2280), the P9 Express and SanDisk cards leverage the NVMe protocol using a PCIe 3.0 x1 interface. That enables maximum sequential read speeds of up to 880 MB/s, with random read/write endurance rated at 65,000 IOPS and 52,000 IOPS, respectively, to contend with the best microSD Express cards.

MicroSD Express cards have roughly 4x the performance of a standard UHS-I card, an essential requirement for use in Nintendo's latest console. Speed is king when loading large textures and other assets. This fast, SSD-like storage is perfect for the Switch 2, but would not be as useful for the likes of the Steam Deck, where the card would only operate at standard microSD speeds.

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