Micro SD Card Results Thread

[GreyBeard]

I've come across mention of several issues with the Deck and various Micro SD cards. What's missing is detailed info on the card and its ability to work with the Deck. Personally, I have a 64 GB on order, but not in my possession, yet. I have a TeamGroup GO 256 GB V30 U3 card ready to go. What I will post once I have the Deck will be in the following format:

[Card Brand] [Model/Designation] [Size] ["V" rating] ["U" rating] ["A" rating]
[Does it work? "Yes/No"] [comments/additional info]

If people would like to just post their results in this format, it would be a godsend to those looking for working SD cards before they get their Deck and spare some unnecessary disappointment/frustration/anger. Thanks, all!

[darrenphillips666]

Or Just get a good brand A1 or A2 rated SDCard?

[PopinFRESH]

darrenphillips666 の投稿を引用：

Or Just get a good brand A1 or A2 rated ?

And from a known good vendor (not eBay or some rando 3rd party seller on Amazon, etc.)

Those standards exist for a reason, compatibility being one of the primary ones. A lot of the issues people report with SD cards are due to the amount of fraudulent cards being sold by scammers. Otherwise, get a card that supports the standards listed by Valve and you'll be g2g.

[GreyBeard]

Excellent points. However, I've seen a couple of threads about known good brands not working well, if at all, with the Deck. Just hoping to provide a concise resource.

[PopinFRESH]

GreyBeard の投稿を引用：

Excellent points. However, I've seen a couple of threads about known good brands not working well, if at all, with the Deck. Just hoping to provide a concise resource.

Hence my second point as there are a lot of fraudulent microSD cards

[darrenphillips666]

Reviews mean nothing depending where you buy the card
Lots of fake non-geniune SD Cards about with realistic stickers and packaging that won’t perform as stated.

Just buy a card from somewhere you can return it if it doesn’t perform as expected or store as much as the label says

[Prime Rib]

Every mainstream card is 30mbps write 100mbps read, the Steam Deck uses a basic SD card slot so you can't gain more than 100mbps read. You can get cards that can write faster but they can cost a bit more.

[PopinFRESH]

Gay Vulture の投稿を引用：

Every mainstream card is 30mbps write 100mbps read, the Steam Deck uses a basic SD card slot so you can't gain more than 100mbps read. You can get cards that can write faster but they can cost a bit more.

Think you missed some capitalization there. 100mbps = 12.5MB/s which is quite painfully slow; and 30mbps = 3.75MB/s

The actual throughput you'll see on a disk is dependent upon the type of I/O workload. Many of the A2 microSD cards will do 160MB/s to 175MB/s sequential reads and 100MB/s sequential writes.

Random I/O is quite a bit slower at around 110MB/s to 120MB/s reads and 50MB/s to 60MB/s writes.

Based on other Linux distributions the only thing that I think is holding the Steam Deck back from seeing those speeds with an A2 card is kernel support for the new features of the A2 cards (command queuing and cache) which were starting to be implemented in kernel version 5.14.

Since you have a Steam Deck, you could hop on to the desktop mode and open the command line to check which version of the Linux kernel SteamOS 3.2 is currently using.

 uname -a 

It's possible that Valve could backport some of those changes but I highly doubt they would do that rather than move to a newer kernel base if there are other beneficial features as well.

[Marlock]

1 mbps (normally used for internet connection speeds) = 1/8 of 1 MB/s (normally used for file transfer speeds)

[Majestic 12]

I bought the Samsung EVO Select 512GB microSDXC UHS-I U3.

It's supposed to be very suitable for Steam Deck but I find that installation is INCREDIBLY slow compared to the internal hard drive. A 15GB game took 3 hours to download and install.

[StoneOcean]

Samsung EVO Select 512GB microSDXC UHS-I U3 here and after 30 sec the download speeds will go down to 10 mb/s that means a 100gb game will take around 4 hours...

[Blakethesnake]

I installed 60 gb doom in about 30 minutes onto sandisk extreme 1tb. Maybe something else is wrong if it took 3 hours

[Majestic 12]

Blakethesnake の投稿を引用：

I installed 60 gb doom in about 30 minutes onto sandisk extreme 1tb. Maybe something else is wrong if it took 3 hours

We both have the same card and both have the exact same "problem". I think the card just can't write large chunks at a time. For reading games it's fine though - they load very fast.

[my new friend]

Same. 1tb and an extra 512gb SanDisk Extreme with no issues like slow down or formatting errors.
Make sure you don't have a fake micro SD card.

[ko]

I use a 512 GB SanDisk Extreme (A2) card with no issues so far. Didn't take long to format and I'm running GTA V and a few other games from it.

[dirk.van.lyrop]

Deck: 512 GB ssd version

Card Brand - Sandisk
Model/Designation - Ultra
Size - 400 GB
Read - up to 120 MB/s
Class - C10
"V" rating - none
"U" rating - U1
"A" rating - A1
Does it work? - Yes
comments/additional info:
runs very well, no in-game stuttering, good and stable write speeds (40 GB download and install on SD in app. 20-25 min), already several on the SD card and no issues

Tipp: install on internal SSD, than move to SD!