Onn microSD Express Card Review: You Get What You Pay for (And It’s Fine)

If you’ve been cranking done Nintendo Switch 2 games, retention is astir apt getting beauteous tight. 256GB of interior retention is uncharacteristically generous for Nintendo, sure, but with large powerfulness comes large record sizes. The console’s first-party games are svelte, but third-party games similar Street Fighter 6 Years 1-2 Fighters Edition (50.8GB) oregon Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition (60.2GB) devour up their just stock of space. If you’re hitting that wall, it’s clip to grow your storage!

Unfortunately, you can’t re-purpose immoderate aged microSD paper for the console – it requires MicroSD Express, a faster mentation of the miniature solid-state retention medium. That means little waiting to load games oregon erstwhile shuffling files betwixt your Switch 2’s interior retention and your added microSD card. While these are usually overmuch much costly than accepted microSD cards, the Onn MicroSD Express paper is the cheapest of them all: A $35.77 microSD paper with 256GB of abstraction that’s sold nether Walmart’s in-house fund tech brand.

Throughput

I’ve been rolling with a 256GB Onn MicroSD Express paper since motorboat due to the fact that it was inexpensive and disposable erstwhile I got my Switch 2 – you could accidental it was (ahem) Onn clip and nether my budget. Walmart claims this paper has up to 800MB/s work throughput (how accelerated it tin service its data) and up to 600MB/s writes (how accelerated information tin beryllium written to it). The Switch 2’s interior storage, by contrast, uses soldered-on UFS 3.1 flash storage, with up to 1,200MB/s writes and up to 2,100MB/s reads.

Whoa, neat numbers, right? Yeah, but don’t enactment excessively overmuch banal successful them; they’re referring to sequential information transfers of large, contiguous files. That gives information rates a nice, agelong runway to climb. Game files are truly conscionable packages that incorporate tons of smaller files, leaving the transportation process perpetually starting and stopping and adding a monolithic throughput penalty.

Performance: File Transfers

That doesn’t mean microSD Express isn’t a immense betterment implicit the archetypal Switch’s modular microSD. It took much than 21 minutes to transportation my transcript of the 17.2GB Super Smash Bros. Ultimate from my archetypal Switch OLED to the Samsung Evo microSD card, and 9.5 minutes to determination it back. On the Switch 2, meanwhile, it took conscionable shy of 5 minutes to transportation to the Onn paper and nether 4 minutes to transportation backmost to the Switch 2 itself.

That’s a large clip savings! I besides recovered it took 7 minutes and 20 seconds to determination Mario Kart World, which takes up 24.6GB connected my console, to my Onn card. That’s a data-writing complaint of 55.91MB/s. Moving the crippled backmost took 319 seconds, astatine a complaint of 77.12MB/s. Transferring the 8.6GB Donkey Kong Bananza to the paper took conscionable 2 minutes, 45 seconds (52.12MB/s), and I waited 3 minutes, 18 seconds (76.11MB/s) for it to transportation back.

Those results were gathered aft a mates months of utilizing the card. After wiping it and re-testing these transfers with Mario Kart World, constitute velocity jumped to 71.10MB/s, and work velocity to 91.45MB/s. That makes consciousness if the card’s information had go fragmented from usage – wiping it and reloading my crippled files onto it whitethorn person helped things.

Performance: Load Times

The comparatively speedy work complaint means little clip waiting to really play your games, though it’s not arsenic accelerated arsenic loading them from interior storage. On average, it took astir 20 percent longer to get to the rubric surface of games stored connected the paper versus natively connected the Switch 2, though it varied from 1 crippled to another. Loading from the Onn card, Donkey Kong Bananza took 25.74 seconds, and Mario Kart World took 20.54 seconds. Re-testing aft wiping and reloading the card, Mario Kart inactive took astir arsenic long, portion Bananza loaded successful 21.43 seconds. From interior storage, I lone waited 20.86 seconds for Bananza and 17.46 seconds for Mario Kart.

It was overmuch person for different games – the Switch 2 variation of No Man’s Sky took 15.37 seconds to load from the microSD Express slot, and 13.98 seconds from interior storage. It was hardly slower to load The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom; 9.78 seconds versus 8.88 seconds. While Super Smash Bros. Ultimate came successful astatine 16.32 seconds from microSD Express and 15.7 seconds from interior storage.

I saw the biggest show gulf with Fast Fusion – a inexpensive antigrav racer you truly should play if you’re an F-Zero instrumentality – loads arsenic accelerated arsenic its cars contention from interior retention astatine 7.32 seconds, practically lapping the sluggish-by-comparison 11.71 seconds from the Onn card.

I’m successful the midst of comparing the Onn paper with PNY’s microSD Express card, and its results were amended than Onn’s astatine first. It initially had higher work throughput, starring to faster crippled load times and quicker transfers to the Switch 2 from the card, portion constitute throughput was connected par with the Onn card. After wiping and reloading the Onn card, though, things mostly evened out.

You Get What You Pay For

These results disagree from what the folks astatine Digital Foundry saw backmost erstwhile the Switch 2 launched. In general, strategy load times versus microSD Express load times didn’t person arsenic overmuch variance, and successful their testing, a Nintendo-supplied SanDisk microSD Express paper they were utilizing really called games up a tiny spot faster than the Switch 2’s interior storage. A SanDisk microSD Express paper is doubly arsenic costly for the aforesaid retention tier, truthful you’d anticipation for amended performance!

Should you prime the Onn paper anyway? It’s not the champion microSD Express paper you tin get for your Switch 2, but I mean, that $35 terms tag for 256GB is beauteous hard to walk up. And though it whitethorn beryllium slower than cards that outgo doubly arsenic much, it’s not terribly so, particularly aft wiping and refilling the card.

Wes is simply a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they telephone him) who has covered technology, gaming, and amusement steadily since 2020 astatine Gizmodo, Tom's Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and astir recently, The Verge. Inside of him determination are 2 wolves: 1 that thinks it wouldn't beryllium truthful atrocious to commencement collecting crippled consoles again, and the different who besides thinks this, but much strongly.