 Today folks, we're gonna talk about a very brand new, real technology being developed by a partner Nintendo has used throughout the Nintendo Switch generation and probably will be using during the Switch 2 generation as well because this new technology is going to create faster external expandable storage options potentially for Nintendo. And there's a lot of reasons to think that this announcement is actually about Nintendo and we're gonna dive into it even though we don't know 100%. So remember, this is mostly speculation, not about the tech. The tech definitely is real and definitely exists. It's been officially announced by Samsung for crying out loud, but it being applied to Nintendo is mostly speculative but also just makes a lot of sense, especially when we revisit a rumor from last year about those demos at Gamescom. So what are we talking about? Or we're gonna head on over to Reddit here they presented this so there's an official press release essentially here from Samsung where they announced a next generation micro SD cards with SSD like speeds which may have been developed for Nintendo. Now that may have been is the speculative part. Well, let's go into this, give you guys some background and all this stuff on this post over here on the gaming leaks and rumors subreddit. Now it says background SD Express is a protocol that was announced some years ago that allow SD cards to reach speeds that are nine times faster than most SD cards currently on the market. There are some that it's only like seven times faster. Anyways, despite its announcement, adoption has been slow because there's a lack of compelling use cases which just makes it really a lack of commercial viability. Right? That's the thing like the tech can exist but there's just not a lot of products that really need micro SD cards to be that quick. So why make these a massive scale and get them widely adopted? It being faster and better, we don't need that for most applications. Well, why is this relevant for Nintendo and Switch Shoe? Samsung states that this product was the direct result of a collaboration with an unspecified customer. Now, interesting as we scroll down here and see that for the first time in the industry Samsung introduced a new high performance micro SD card based on the SD Express interface. The development was a result of a successful collaboration with a customer to create a custom product. Nintendo Switch Shoe is expected to be a generational leap that targets visual fidelity and performance closer to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S slash X. And they're talking about closer than the Switch. Obviously they're not saying it's gonna be like neck and neck with those systems. Nintendo has extremely limited options for storage expansion as current SD cards are far too slow and MVME SSDs, which is what they're using to do expansion for Xbox and PlayStation 5. PlayStation 5, you literally just buy a commercially available MVME SSD of Xbox but with a proprietary version in cartridge form. But both of them are the same process. They're using MVME SSDs for expansion. But the problem with that is that they are really large and power hungry and they operate at high temps. Not something that's really commercially viable for a on the go platform. And we know that Steam Deck and some of these handheld PCs happen to use them but they're at really high power draws and it affects battery life and it doesn't always make sense. So here's the thing. This new SD Express micro SD card solves every problem faced by Nintendo for storage expansion. It offers SSD like speeds, which gives you a feature we'll talk about in a moment. Tiny form factors, manageable thermals in high starting capacity, 256 gigabytes and above. While the press release does not directly mention gaming, it is strange for Samsung not to name the customer in question which they have done with prior announcements. The card is also slated to launch this year which does match the previously rumored release date for Switch 2 before it's delayed to March of 2025, reportedly. A portable game console is one of the only products that is a good use case for this kind of high speed card and probably the only product with a sales volume that would justify commercial viability. Now that is important to note because it's not that all these handheld PCs couldn't benefit from this technology. It's that the sales volume of those handheld PCs will likely not create a high enough volume of consumers to still make these at a custom high end scale. What's fascinating here though is the direct quote, if you go back and look at it here, says the development was a result of successful collaboration with the customer to create a custom product. Now this does to me sound like Nintendo may go with a custom expandable storage solution and might not even take standard micro SD cards or even these SD express cards. That is obviously very, very fascinating if it doesn't take those because they had a proprietary one made by Samsung. Now that is pretty interesting because naturally Switch 2 would justify a likely sales volume for Samsung to make these at scale for people to wanna purchase. It also means it's probably gonna be significantly more expensive than your standard micro SD card, but it makes sense because you're getting SSD like speeds. Now you're not gonna get quite up to these top speeds of the best MVMEs you're seeing put inside PlayStation 5 and all that but you can get close enough. And the reason this matters is because if you go back to the old rumors about those Gamescom demos, one of the things said is that Breath of the Wild had instant loading, no load time at all, no trickery done. That was one of the things they were advertising to people were these instant load times. So if those instant load times can only be done on the internal storage of the system, then what are we talking about? What are we talking about? Like if it can't be done natively on the cartridges and it can't be done on the internal storage, which only done on the internal storage which is always gonna be exceeded, what happens when the games are parked on a micro SD card? They're clearly not gonna be able to have that instant loading unless they're using this new technology. Whether or not this new technology will also be put into a cartridge format and that is something they're gonna be using instead of going the NAND flash route. That's obviously something that could be debated as well. This custom storage product could be that, although because they're looking at such high capacities of 256 gigabytes and above, they're not gonna make a 256 gigabyte cartridge. I just don't see that being viable in the marketplace. It'd be too expensive. So I think this is more so just for the expandable storage. And guys, this makes just a lot of sense. That's why people are talking about it because while we don't know if it's for Nintendo, it literally solves all the issues Nintendo could currently be facing in trying to have expandable storage and this would have been a partnership obviously made a year or two years ago with Samsung to develop this product because this technology already existed then. And obviously Nintendo is not adverse to going with custom storage solutions even though they've been using SD and micro SD cards for quite some time. Difference is now one of the things they might wanna advertise to third-party partners and reportedly did last year is the ability to basically have instant loading with no load screens. That requires not only just being able to quickly move things from your RAM out to the visual user through the GPU, it's also that you need to have fast enough storage in order to get that data out to people. Like that could be the big hiccup. There's like literally games now on PC that require SSDs to make sure that they can actually run decently. The spinning discs are getting too slow. The micro SDs have always been too slow to do it. So it very fascinating to me. I'm just gonna sit back and see what happens in this space. I am very curious. And look, again, this is something that if it was originally planned to come out later this year, maybe it's been delayed. Maybe it'll still have like an official product reveal after switch two is revealed when they reveal, hey, here's our brand new custom cartridges that offer blazingly fast speeds. And that's how Nintendo justifies the premium they're gonna end up charging for them. I don't know, we'll have to wait and see. Obviously there's a lot of unknowns here. What we do know is Samsung is making this product. The product does exist and it solves a lot of problems and it would make a lot of sense for Nintendo to use it. On the flip side, you could argue that Nintendo might just wanna say, hey, we're compatible with SD, but if you want the best stuff, we're also compatible with SD Express. But again, they're not made at a massive scale. So it would take a partnership deal to make custom stuff to make this even happen. So I don't know, we'll see what happens folks. I am Nathaniel Robledance from Nintendo Prime. Give me your thoughts on all of this down in the comments below and we'll catch you in the next video.