Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds
54 comments
·August 16, 2025DiabloD3
seabrookmx
Worth mentioning that the Nintendo Switch 2 supports SD Express, so in a few years millions of households will have these cards laying around.
dingaling
*lying around
Laying is transitive and requires an object.
Projectiboga
Please lay off with the pedantry.
DecentShoes
Pointless and unhelpful grammar Nazism.
uoaei
Love the latent pedantry of HN. No shade! Bravo/brava!
echelon
I need this slot added back to my phone. Thank you very much, phone manufacturers.
mitthrowaway2
Try a Sony Xperia! Vote with your dollar or else they'll stop making them!
zoeysmithe
Hmm the article isn't about the interface being novel but the drives. The article claims the SD express cards top out a 900 MB/s but this drive does 3700 MB/s. They are using their own interface, but that's not the problem being solved here from my reading of this article.
I don't know the specifics but SD express might be patent/license encumbered so why pay when you can make your own for free?
I'm guessing this drive will eventually percolate down in the form of an SD Express card, and SD express is now in the Switch 2. The Biwin drive is currently too big to fit the SD spec, but that might not be true in the future.
I think Nintendo just sealed the deal against any SD Express competitors. This article is (probably) planted PR to promote this drive to Western buyers interested in maximizing their SD Express slots in a "Hey, why do these Chinese gamers get this amazing card and I'm stuck with this junk?" Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.
Storage upgrades in handhelds seems to be a real problem. I was surprised my Steam Deck didn't have an easy to access M2 slot because of Valve's "pro-gamer" reputation. You have to take the entire thing apart to get to the SSD and the plain-jane SD slot you do get will never feel fast enough, especially since its hardware capped at 104 MB/s. Gabe didn't become a billionaire by not being ruthless I suppose, but it is disappointing.
I'm guessing a lot of these devices are sold at a premium for more storage so they don't want to make it easy to upgrade fast storage on your own. Instead we're just forced into the SD card ghetto. Maybe Biwin can change that, or the handheld makers will push against that if it means hurting their margins because the higher storage models are more profitable. Nintendo at least seems to signaling, "Do whatever you want with this fast SD slot," which is a breath of fresh air. What a time in gaming, where Nintendo is more progressive and pro-consumer than Valve.
DiabloD3
The article is full of shit. SD Express cards, by virtue of being PCI-E x1 or x2, top out at whichever gen of PCI-E they implement.
Lets say its a brand new 4.0 card that implements x2 lanes, that is 3.93GB/s maximum speed (there aren't any 5.0 cards yet, afaik, but double that for 5.0).
Want to know where that 900MB/s figure came from? A 3.0 x1 card is 984MB/s. That is the first gen SD Express cards when the spec was launched, but not the currently available ones.
In other words, this is a PR release, this isn't news. It's marketing. They chose the worst case of their competitors, the best case of their own, and lied by omission.
Also, re: Valve's position on M2: they didn't support even swapping them when it first came out, although obviously allowed and expected, because you can put M2s in the device that are outside of the thermal parameters allowed by the design due to proximity to the battery and other heat producing items. This is also why they specifically used a 2230, as those are usually the lower power models meant for ultrathin laptops.
That said, Valve has worked with a few companies to get some officially blessed 2230s that actually do fit the intended use case and are also performant.
Like, if you think the Steam Deck sucks for actually doing the swap job, a) the new OLED replacement internally is a lot saner, with both construction and PCB layout, b) go try dealing with the really nasty designed laptops that don't have an externally accessible panel covering the drive bay; they're worse.
zoeysmithe
I'm sorry I dont care how hard valve tried. They still failed. To the consumer, the sd card limitation on the Deck is consumer hostile. 100 MB/s is inexcusable for a device being sold today and one expected to run Unity and Unreal 4 games that clock in at the tens of gigabytes. They should have made it more open and allowed easy access to M2 slots. Instead they used storage cynically to sell higher tier products.
The entry level deck is $399 but the 1TB one is $649. Almost $800 with tax and shipping for something that can't even play Unreal 5 games and has no proper expansion is inexcusable, not to mention the bizarre and shortsighted decision to have only one USB-C port on the device, and being locked onto the 15-watt mode of the chipset.
Some of that cost is the OLED update but frankly its deceptive and dishonest customer hostile pricing. The storage limitations are intentional to sell the higher tier Deck. Gabe didn't get 5 super yachts by being a "good guy." He's just maximizing his profit. There are no "good guys" in capitalism, instead its purely transactional and game theory dictated from top to bottom.
I do find it a little depressing that Chinese and Japanese companies are eating US companies lunches because they somehow are more open, more pro-consumer, and more affordable the US offerings. When in the past the US products were the more open and hackable ones and the imports were the proprietary and locked down customer-hostile messes. Not just this but a lot of electronics now. The hackable, learnable, fun, etc ones are foreign while the US domestic ones are overly 'not repairable' and 'not hackable' and by design to maximize profit. What a shame. How far we've fallen.
Dylan16807
> Hmm the article isn't about the interface being novel but the drives. The article claims the SD express cards top out a 900 MB/s but this drive does 3700 MB/s. They are using their own interface, but that's not the problem being solved here from my reading of this article.
It's a really weak claim when you frame it properly. If you have a good controller you can use either form factor just fine, at PCIe gen 4 x2 speed.
> maximizing their SD Express slots [...] Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.
That would be nice!
zeroq
SD download option is the answer.
I think this whole issue shouldn't exist in the first place.
I do understand that full voice over and 4k ready textures comes at a price but some devs are getting lazy and some games are just ridiculous.
We're talking about handhelds like Steam Deck. Even if I plug it in as a console it won't have the juice to run at full resolution.
When I want to quickly grab an episode of a tv series to watch on my mobile I'll be super happy with 300mb 720p version. I don't need a 50gb rip in 4k in HDR with Atmos sound. Same option should be available for games.
NDxTreme
This adds use cases to the devices. For instance, I am using my Steam Deck to type this hooked up to a 32 inch Monitor, as my daily driver on CachyOS.*
I bought the cheapest one, and upgraded the SSD. I also have an SD card. I use this for more than just playing games.
I would love to be able to just upgrade the storage and it be as fast as the internal storage. I could install a Windows install on it, and switch when it makes sense.
* Arch-by-the-way
ThatPlayer
I've considered installing CachyOS on my Deck to be able to use bcachefs for a tiered storage setup with the SD card. For automatic movement of unused files to the SD card over time, because I don't want to deal with managing it myself.
Though I also did the SSD upgrade and haven't really been bothered by space, so haven't bothered. I have that setup on a spare parts PC with HDDs instead of microSD, since that's an older 1/2 TB SSD.
Talanes
And we know it can be done on existing download infrastructure, because it's available for all the games I own that added the hi-res textures after launch - selectable as a free DLC.
trenchpilgrim
Heck, twenty years ago games like Guild Wars would download just the first few levels and then download the rest of the game in the background as you played!
Zenst
I think many would be amazed at how the space used on a game today is broken down in space usage. Most will be along the lines of cut scenes, graphics, audio......library and librarys galore...logic code of the program that is unique to the game and finally some text file hidden away.
But talking your AAA kind of titles that seem to be the norm, not your chess games, though even then, graphics sure has gained space in those programs. Though I'm sure somebody active in the industry could paint a better picture.
Anybody active in the industry able to offer or point to better breakdown?
codebje
In general: code << world < audio << textures << video
Executable code is pretty tiny relative to everything else, including libraries. Libraries only get really big when they include media assets. When it comes to media, even high fidelity audio is relatively small. 44kHz stereo 16-bit sample audio, uncompressed, is 176kb per second of audio. A 1024x1024 texture, at 32bpp, is 4mb, uncompressed. Video depends heavily on codec, but roughly consider that 4k video is something like 4096x2160, so eight times the size of our static texture for a single frame. Encodings don't just store every frame whole, of course, but keyframes add up quick.
userbinator
The Verge reports that a Chinese company called Biwin has developed the "Mini SSD," a 15 by 17 mm-thick card that supports read speeds of up to 3,700MB per second due to a two-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface.
So this is basically a smaller NVMe SSD?
MBCook
Yes. A very very small one.
MBCook
Despite the title of the article, this seems useful in phones or laptops to me.
Even if not user replaceable without opening the device it would make it possible to have replaceable drives at a tiny fraction of the current minimum size.
Even just for relatability compared to soldered on storage it would be a plus.
userbinator
it would make it possible to have replaceable drives
The manufacturers don't seem to want that. Even the small Chinese companies which were the last holdouts have gone full forced-obsolescence.
laidoffamazon
I’m still surprised the steam deck runs so well even with games installed to microSD - I’m not sure how they do it.
LeoPanthera
The answer is probably that disk read speed just isn't that important for casual applications like games.
We had a lot of great games even when storage was spinning rust.
dontlaugh
It’s actually essential for more serious games without loading screens, which is why for example the PS5 ships with and mandates fast SSDs.
LeoPanthera
I would guess that's only a small percentage of popular games, though. The Steam Deck and the PS5 probably don't attract the same kind of gamer.
merpkz
Yeah, I am using my Deck with 512GB sdcard and could never tell it is actually running from sdcard. It does a lot of game updates and always finishes those in reasonable time, at least for me. That card is going strong with all the writes going on on steam deck
Palomides
decent SD cards can do 200 or 300 MB/s of reads now
null
Dylan16807
Those speeds are... complicated.
UHS-I cards easily go up to 100MB/s. This is the baseline for a modern SD card.
After that you can add more pins for UHS-II. This is used in a bunch of devices and goes up to 300MB/s, but you can't assume anything will have it. And UHS-III was dead on arrival.
Alternatively you can add a different set of more pins for SD Express. It can do gigabytes per second and is probably the future. It's backwards compatible with UHS-I, but not II or III.
And also SanDisk made their own spec for overclocking UHS-I which some things support. It can do about 200MB/s.
The steam deck supports none of those upgrade paths. You get about 100MB/s.
DecentShoes
Not in the Steam Deck, it maxes out at 104Mb/s.
Considering the insane tempuratures the cards reach, and that it destroys brand new SD cards, I don't want them going any faster until it works safely.
Rohansi
The Steam Deck only supports up to UHS-I. There are UHS-II and UHS-III cards out there that support higher bandwidth.
KingOfCoders
I was so amazed when I held the Microdrive harddisk in my hands for the first time. And later the first iPod that was made possible with a Microdrive. These things lead to new gadget categories, not only making existing ones better.
wao0uuno
CFexpress type B already exists and does the same thing.
Seattle3503
Any chance someone builds a phone with removable storage now that we have better SD cards?
NewJazz
It was never about the SD cards, it was about the removable part.
uoaei
This is obviously the direction of persistent storage: SD meets SSD. Technological innovations are reliably predictable at this relatively high level. If you didn't see it coming, better get in quick before everyone else catches on!
superkuh
I can see the needed use case for portable devices. But I also get the feeling this shrinking down of physical volume for storage that's going to be generally available for A tier games (like on a steamdeck) is a status quo setting us back to 2010 levels of actual storage available. Again! Just when normal desktop computer SSD were finally rising in actual capacity beyond 2TB. And right when SSD storage is hitting the wall with no more multi-level cell improvements available.
suprjami
No. We have MicroSD Express. We don't need yet another form factor.
RainyDayTmrw
The SD and micro SD form factors are not the most robust or reliable. It would be nice to have a next step up form factor. In some ways, that's the motivation for CF Express Type B (and XQD before it), as popularized in digital photography.
a1o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress
Interesting, I didn't knew about this format. Curious picture selection on the Wikipedia, I didn't knew about this manufacturer until reading the Ars article above.
RainyDayTmrw
It was new-ish, and it barely caught on, only in some digital camera lines for some brands (Nikon and Sony). If anything, plenty of prosumers were annoyed that they now had to buy new cards to use the second slot. The rollout was also bad. Some manufacturers thought they could get away with one slot only (Nikon Z6 mark I had only the single XQD slot, a precursor to CF Express Type B), owing to the improved reliability of CF Express as a form factor, but that was a bad idea, and didn't account for failures in the underlying flash or controller, and that annoyed actual pros.
Dylan16807
A step up form factor is great. The thing in the article is not a step up though, it's smaller than an SD card, and there's no great reason for it. Since it's brand new it can guarantee a better minimum speed than SD express, but that advantage falls away fast and it's not worth the hassle of an extra format.
I'm reminded of XFMEXPRESS, a tech that had some justification to exist as a low profile replaceable and coolable main storage for small devices. But it doesn't look like it went anywhere.
kjkjadksj
Weird how this three day old comment shows up as 52 minutes old right now. What is going on with HN?
Dylan16807
It's called the "second chance pool" for articles.
SnuffBox
What if it can offer better transfer speeds? A system that downloads large files often would presumably be bottlenecked by a MicroSD's write speeds.
mrheosuper
it's microSD express, unless you have multi-gigabit network, you won't saturate it.
The biggest issue with these small form memory is heat, they heat up a lot, but seem like no one care.
We already have this though. SD Express, which allows SD cards to actually protocol switch to one lane PCI-E NVME. It's been part of the spec officially since 2018, and an enhancement slightly later to add more pins to allow a second lane.
And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any real controller is going to cook.