Best microSD cards for a Nintendo Switch

One table, four cards, the Samsung EVO Select 256GB is the one to buy unless you have a reason not to.

What actually matters

The Switch's card slot is UHS-I only, full stop — a UHS-II card will work, but you're paying for a second lane of bandwidth the hardware can't use. Don't chase read speeds much past 100–130MB/s for that reason. What does matter is the Application Performance Class rating (A1 or A2): it governs random read/write performance, which is what determines how snappy games feel loading directly off the card rather than internal storage. For homebrew specifically, where you're often running games from the card full-time, A2 is worth the small premium over A1.

On capacity: 256GB is the practical floor for a card you won't outgrow within a year. 128GB fills up fast once you're backing up a handful of games; 512GB only pays off if you're maintaining a large library or keeping full-game backups alongside your originals.

The comparison

Prices move often — TerabyteDeals tracks current microSD prices across Amazon's US, DE, and UK stores if you want to compare before buying.

Avoiding fakes

Counterfeit cards are common enough on third-party marketplace listings to be worth a specific warning: they typically report a larger capacity than they actually have, then silently corrupt or drop data once you exceed the real limit. Buy from a listing sold and shipped by the retailer directly, and if you want to be certain, run a full write/verify pass with H2testw (Windows) or F3 (Mac/Linux) before trusting a new card with anything you can't afford to lose.

One formatting note: cards over 64GB ship formatted exFAT, which some homebrew setups still expect as FAT32. Check your CFW guide's requirements before you format.