Most microSD cards are fast enough for stashing photos, recording video and transferring files, but some will get you a little more bang for your buck than others. If you’re looking to boost the storage of your Nintendo Switch 2, Steam Deck, GoPro or any other device that still accepts microSD cards, we can help. We’ve thoroughly researched the market and several cards through a suite of benchmark tests: Here are the best that we’ve tested, along with some general advice on what to look for when buying a new card. Table of contents Best microSD cards of 2025 Best microSD Express cards for the Nintendo Switch 2 Other notable microSD cards What to look for in a microSD card How we test microSD cards Recent updates Best microSD cards of 2025 Best microSD Express cards for the Nintendo Switch 2 Jeff Dunn for Engadget Read our full guide to the best microSD Express cards for the Nintendo Switch 2 Let’s be clear about this: Unless you plan to own a Nintendo Switch 2 in the near future, you do not need a high-speed microSD Express card just yet. Nintendo’s gaming handheld is the only popular device that natively supports this standard right now, and microSD Express cards themselves are highly expensive compared to more traditional options. Still, if you do want to increase a Switch 2’s storage, they’re your only choice. Fortunately, determining exactly which model to buy for the console is pretty straightforward: Get whichever one you can find in stock, in the capacity you want, at a price you can stomach. We benchmarked several microSD Express cards for a separate Switch 2 guide, and for the most part, the performance differences between them weren’t great enough to justify paying much extra for any particular model. Loading times weren’t quite identical with every test we ran, but the cards were extremely close in most games. When there was a gap — fast-traveling to a particularly resource-heavy region in Cyberpunk 2077, for instance — the gulf between the slowest and fastest card was only ever about 3 seconds at most. That’s not nothing, but it’s not something you’re likely to fret over unless you have a stopwatch handy. The SanDisk microSD Express Card and Lexar Play Pro. Jeff Dunn for Engadget The only time you’d notice a major speed difference is if you transfer games to your Express card from the Switch 2’s internal storage (and vice versa). In that case, the SanDisk microSD Express Card and Lexar Play Pro were generally the quickest, while PNY’s microSD Express Flash Memory Card had particularly slow write speeds. Moving Mario Kart World to the SanDisk and Lexar models, for example, took around four minutes and 35 seconds on average; with the PNY card, it took a little over seven minutes. That said, the PNY model was the fastest when it came to moving games back to the system storage. Either way, most people aren’t constantly shuffling their games back and forth like this. Performance in actual games is more important, and in that regard the results were consistently much tighter. What matters most is getting the most space for your budget. Unfortunately, stock for all microSD Express cards has been spotty since the Switch 2’s launch. For your convenience, we’ll list out all of the models we’ve seen at retailers thus far and their respective list prices below. The only one we haven’t tested is the Walmart Onn model, which happens to be the most affordable (but has also been out of stock for much of the past several months). Note that some lower-capacity versions — the 128GB SanDisk card, for one — advertise slower speeds than their more spacious counterparts. SanDisk microSD Express Card: 128GB ($60), 256GB ($73), 512GB ($125) Lexar Play Pro: 256GB ($60), 512GB ($120), 1TB ($220) PNY microSD Express Flash Memory Card: 128GB ($47), 256GB ($63), 512GB ($120) Samsung microSD Express Card for Nintendo Switch 2: 256GB ($60) GameStop Express microSD Card for Nintendo Switch 2: 256GB ($60), 512GB ($100), 1TB ($190) Walmart Onn microSDXC Express Card: 256GB ($36), 512GB ($66) The Lexar Play Pro on top of Lexar’s RW540 microSD Express card reader. Jeff Dunn for Engadget Broadly speaking, we recommend getting at least 256GB of storage, as Switch 2 games tend to have much larger file sizes than games for Nintendo’s previous handheld. But we also recommend holding off upgrading for as long as you can, if only because all of these cards should (tariff shenanigans aside) come down in price as time goes on. There’s no point in buying a microSD Express card for anything besides the Switch 2, but we did run the models above through our usual PC benchmarks as well. Unsurprisingly, they are miles faster than any traditional card on the market. With the 256GB SanDisk card, for instance, sequential read speeds checked in just under 900 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark and ATTO, while sequential writes topped out around 650 MB/s. Sustained writes speeds were slower (around 210 MB/s), but that was still fast enough to move our 12GB test file to the card in 52 seconds on average. It took a mere 20 seconds to read the file back to our PC. The write test with our smaller 1.15GB test folder, meanwhile, averaged just 4.5 seconds. It all adds up to performance that’s at least twice as fast as the best UHS-I models we’ve tested in terms of sequential reads and writes, with three or four times the speeds in some cases. The gulf in random reads and writes is similar, and in some benchmarks even greater. But you need a pricey SD card reader to even see those increases on a PC, so only those with a Switch 2 in hand or serious cash to burn should consider one of these things. Other notable microSD cards Samsung Pro Ultimate The Samsung Pro Ultimate was the closest competitor to the Lexar Professional Silver Plus across our benchmark tests, but it’s