How will be Switch 2 performance wise?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Zippy6 said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

MicroSD cards will probably be too slow by that point for many games, especially for texture streaming. M.2 2230 SSDs would be better and also cheaper past 256GB than MicroSD cards, but also much larger and more difficult to handle for most clients. As such I think Nintendo could come up with their own propietary standard that would be fast enough but also just as easy to handle as an SD card or a cartridge.

Awwww hell no. Let's not repeat the mistake of the Xbox Series SSD's or the Vita memory cards. Proprietary always shafts consumers on value.

Compared to M.2 SSDs, that would certainly be true. But like I said, they're not exactly designed to be handled by children or to be constantly swapped.

SD cards with more than 256GB are rare and expensive, plus they are very slow - too slow for modern games unless they're the very expensive and extremely rare SD Express cards (which, like SSDs and CFexpress cards, are based on PCi Express). In fact, I could barely find any SD card that's faster than UHS-I here which can barely compete with hard drives in terms of speed, and thise I found were all just UHS-II, so basically a bit faster than your average old HDD, but far slower than modern SSDs.

CFexpress cards are also expensive (512GB start at ~250€, 400€ for 1TB, 650€ for 2TB), and relatively rare. But at least those would be fast (comparable to M.2 SSDs, as both are based on PCI Express) and much easier to store and handle than M.2 SSDs. Their main problem apart of the price is that they come in 3 different sizes, so there may easily be some major confusion when buying a card and it doesn't fit.

UFS cards are even rarer (I couldn't even find any on friggin' Amazon!) and as such probably also expensive as hell... if they're even still in production, as the built-in standard is several levels more recent than the cards. And that's despite the first cards got produced in 2020...

In short, there ain't no perfect standard for removable storage for a Nintendo handheld. M.2's are not supposed to be taken out and replaced all the time, and children could easily mishandle them, SD cards are too slow and pretty expensive past 256GB, CFexpress are great for the use case but expensive, harder to come by and with confusing sizes, and UFS cards haven't been seen in the wild. As such, it could be easier (and potentially even cheaper for non-tech-savvy consumers who don't know how to handle M.2s) if Nintendo makes their own storage.