''Warning'' SD card download/install speed is very slow!

[StoneOcean]

Samsung EVO plus A2 V30 512GB
After around 20 sec the install speed will go down to around 5-8mb/s
So 100gb download of a game will take around 4 hours.

Is this only happening me? V30 card should offer a minimum of 30 mb/s

[Chimp Taggart]

Originally posted by RoyalMetalKnights:

Originally posted by 亜双義一真:

Hey bro, I'm having the same problem as you, the SD card will overheat when downloading games and then the speed becomes 0 or very slow, could you please guide me on how to use GParted to make the SD card work better, I'm a complete newbie, thanks.

I don't think it's an issue with overheating, I think the built-in Format option on the Deck Game Mode messes up the partition on the SD card.

I had GParted on a bootable USB flash drive as parted of the process of setting up dual-boot for Windows. I also have a USB-C hub to plug it into the Deck along with a keyboard.

I can run you through all that, but first you should try formatting using KDE Partition Manager that's built into Steam Desktop Mode(aka KDE Plasma). I just tried it out on my card, and the speeds seem fine when I downloaded Left 4 Dead 2. Took about 10min to download, then another 2-3min to verify. That whole process would have taken hours when I used the Deck format option previously and my card was behaving weirdly.

Here's the process:
1. Turn on your Steam Deck
2. Hit the 'Steam' button and go to 'Power' and select 'Switch to Desktop Mode'
3. In Desktop mode, click the Start button in the bottom left corner(Steam logo)
4. Select 'System', then off to the right select 'KDE Partition Manager'
5. Off to the left under 'Devices' it will show 2 options: 1 will be 'mmcblk0' and the other will be your internal SSD(named after the drive manufacturer. Mine says "KINGSTON")
6. By default the SD card(mmcblk0) should be selected. If not, select it.
7. In the middle area of the program it will show your partitions. It will show the SD card partition and it should have a little blue box next to 'ext4' under type, a lock icon under mount, and the size and used space.
8. Using the right trackpad hover over it, then using the left trackpad click it. A drop-down menu will appear.
9. Select 'Unmount'
10. Click it again with the left trackpad and select 'Delete'. In the bottom of the program in the 'Pending Operations' box make sure it says "Delete partition". At this point you can undo this if it doesn't. Make sure it doesn't say "Shred", it should say 'Delete'.
11. If it says "Delete Partition", then in the top left of the program just below 'File' there's a button for 'Apply'. Click 'Apply'.
12. A pop-up will appear asking if you want to apply the Delete partition operation. Select 'Apply Pending Operations' button.
13. Operation will finish. Press 'OK'.
14. In the middle box it will now say 'unallocated', 'unknown', and the drive size.
15. Use the left trackpad to click it, and select 'New' from the drop-down menu.
16. In the pop-up, change the 'File System' option to 'ext4' and click 'OK'.
17. Press the 'Apply' button in the top left of the program
18. A pop-up will appear. Press the 'Apply Pending Operations' button.
19. It will take about 50secs to create a new ext4 partition. After it's done, the Desktop will pop-up a Disk & Devices alert showing a new SD was inserted. Just shrink this using the down-arrow in the bottom right corner.
20. Hit 'OK' on the box in KDE Partition Manager then close it.
21. Click the 'Return to Game Mode' button on the Desktop
22. Once you're in Game Mode, eject your SD card and re-insert it.
23. Click the Steam button and go to 'Settings'
24. Scroll down to 'Storage' and click it. It should show your 'Internal Drive' and 'MicroSD Card'. The MicroSD Card should have a gold star next to it, meaning it's the default installation drive. If not, select it and hit 'X' to 'Make Default'.
25. Install a game then hit the Steam menu button and go to 'Downloads' to watch the progress, download speed, and disk usage speed.

I downloaded Left 4 Dead 2 and it starts off really fast and has high disk usage(around 70MB/s). Then it as it installs it will drop down to around 20MB/s for most the install, then speed up again at the end. The download took about 10min to download 8GB and install 14GB, then it took another 3-4min to verify the installation. It never went to zero like before. Before it would take hours to install a game. For bigger games like God of War I was having to leave the Deck on overnight. Now it should be normal again. A 10-14GB game like Left 4 Dead 2 should take ~15min total. A bigger game like God of War should take maybe an hour.

Let me knew if you have any questions about the process.

You're a god my friend. This seemed to mend my slow MicroSD issue entirely. Not sure if its something with the Steam Deck's default formatting but It'd usually crawl at 3 mb/s then drop to kb/s. With your fix it's much more quick sitting at 11-20 mb/s.

[River]

Originally posted by RoyalMetalKnights:

Originally posted by 亜双義一真:

Hey bro, I'm having the same problem as you, the SD card will overheat when downloading games and then the speed becomes 0 or very slow, could you please guide me on how to use GParted to make the SD card work better, I'm a complete newbie, thanks.

I don't think it's an issue with overheating, I think the built-in Format option on the Deck Game Mode messes up the partition on the SD card.

I had GParted on a bootable USB flash drive as parted of the process of setting up dual-boot for Windows. I also have a USB-C hub to plug it into the Deck along with a keyboard.

I can run you through all that, but first you should try formatting using KDE Partition Manager that's built into Steam Desktop Mode(aka KDE Plasma). I just tried it out on my card, and the speeds seem fine when I downloaded Left 4 Dead 2. Took about 10min to download, then another 2-3min to verify. That whole process would have taken hours when I used the Deck format option previously and my card was behaving weirdly.

Here's the process:
1. Turn on your Steam Deck
2. Hit the 'Steam' button and go to 'Power' and select 'Switch to Desktop Mode'
3. In Desktop mode, click the Start button in the bottom left corner(Steam logo)
4. Select 'System', then off to the right select 'KDE Partition Manager'
5. Off to the left under 'Devices' it will show 2 options: 1 will be 'mmcblk0' and the other will be your internal SSD(named after the drive manufacturer. Mine says "KINGSTON")
6. By default the SD card(mmcblk0) should be selected. If not, select it.
7. In the middle area of the program it will show your partitions. It will show the SD card partition and it should have a little blue box next to 'ext4' under type, a lock icon under mount, and the size and used space.
8. Using the right trackpad hover over it, then using the left trackpad click it. A drop-down menu will appear.
9. Select 'Unmount'
10. Click it again with the left trackpad and select 'Delete'. In the bottom of the program in the 'Pending Operations' box make sure it says "Delete partition". At this point you can undo this if it doesn't. Make sure it doesn't say "Shred", it should say 'Delete'.
11. If it says "Delete Partition", then in the top left of the program just below 'File' there's a button for 'Apply'. Click 'Apply'.
12. A pop-up will appear asking if you want to apply the Delete partition operation. Select 'Apply Pending Operations' button.
13. Operation will finish. Press 'OK'.
14. In the middle box it will now say 'unallocated', 'unknown', and the drive size.
15. Use the left trackpad to click it, and select 'New' from the drop-down menu.
16. In the pop-up, change the 'File System' option to 'ext4' and click 'OK'.
17. Press the 'Apply' button in the top left of the program
18. A pop-up will appear. Press the 'Apply Pending Operations' button.
19. It will take about 50secs to create a new ext4 partition. After it's done, the Desktop will pop-up a Disk & Devices alert showing a new SD was inserted. Just shrink this using the down-arrow in the bottom right corner.
20. Hit 'OK' on the box in KDE Partition Manager then close it.
21. Click the 'Return to Game Mode' button on the Desktop
22. Once you're in Game Mode, eject your SD card and re-insert it.
23. Click the Steam button and go to 'Settings'
24. Scroll down to 'Storage' and click it. It should show your 'Internal Drive' and 'MicroSD Card'. The MicroSD Card should have a gold star next to it, meaning it's the default installation drive. If not, select it and hit 'X' to 'Make Default'.
25. Install a game then hit the Steam menu button and go to 'Downloads' to watch the progress, download speed, and disk usage speed.

I downloaded Left 4 Dead 2 and it starts off really fast and has high disk usage(around 70MB/s). Then it as it installs it will drop down to around 20MB/s for most the install, then speed up again at the end. The download took about 10min to download 8GB and install 14GB, then it took another 3-4min to verify the installation. It never went to zero like before. Before it would take hours to install a game. For bigger games like God of War I was having to leave the Deck on overnight. Now it should be normal again. A 10-14GB game like Left 4 Dead 2 should take ~15min total. A bigger game like God of War should take maybe an hour.

Let me knew if you have any questions about the process.

🥳 *update* The partition creation passes through after 12 mins and the download speed is back to normal (50MB/s) again! You are a true life saver and Valve should definitely address this issue!

Thank you for the tutorial. This is honestly the most detailed written tutorial I have seen, much better than a tedious Youtube video.

As I proceeded through the steps, I got stuck at step 19 to create a new partition. it's been 10 minutes and the progress is stuck at 25%. The time is still ticking so i guess the partition manager hasn't crashed. Should I cancel it and redo it again? Thanks!

[zBeeble]

I have a 512G steam deck. I also have a local server and I've taken the time to get ssh and whatnot working.

With scp, I get 23MB/s to the internal disk and 23MB/s to the Sandisk extreme 1T that I got today. That's transferring one large 83G file (that just happened to be lying around.

Now... 23 MB/s (megabyte/s) is in the neighbourhood of 200 megabit/s. I'm pretty sure my wifi _can_ do better than that, but it's not bad wifi performance.

I had the sd card in my workstation to test it (read other posts) ... it sustained 75MB/s over a 750 Gig write. So the card has some reasonable performance. I was pulling that file from spinning rust, so I'm also OK with that number.

So lets move on. I used dd on the command line to copy /dev/zero. I don't think anything is compressing here... so it's a real test.

On the internal disk, it sustained a write at 1.4GB/s. OK. That's a bit fast...

(deck@steamdeck Downloads)$ dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1048576 count=102400
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
107374182400 bytes (107 GB, 100 GiB) copied, 77.1671 s, 1.4 GB/s

... OK... that _might_ be shenanigans. (still... it's pretty fast at the OS level...) Let's create a 10G file with /dev/random (/dev/random itself only seems to give it up at around 60MB/s).

(deck@steamdeck Downloads)$ dd if=bar of=baz bs=1048576
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB, 10 GiB) copied, 43.0578 s, 249 MB/s

... still not shabby.

Now... the sdcard:

(deck@steamdeck Downloads)$ dd if=bar of=/run/media/mmcblk0p1/baz bs=1048576
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB, 10 GiB) copied, 135.059 s, 79.5 MB/s

hrm. That' s actually a tad faster than the workstation (but not coming from spinning rust) ... so 80 MB/s ... that's a good result.

... now this is with one meg reads and writes. I'm testing the U3 nature of the card, not the A2. But still... the steam deck and the card are pretty OK.

[JahJah192]

Originally posted by ~Senpai:

How can you guys tell it's the SD card that is overheating?

touching it. use the backside of your finger (more sens) it gets very hot. funfact the belly is insane sensetive, i had my steam deck resting on my belly while chillin in my garden and started a download after some time i took it of cause it was very hot on the tiny sd slot, touched it with my fingertip almost don´t feel that much heat.

[InsertValue]

Originally posted by RoyalMetalKnights:

Originally posted by 亜双義一真:

Hey bro, I'm having the same problem as you, the SD card will overheat when downloading games and then the speed becomes 0 or very slow, could you please guide me on how to use GParted to make the SD card work better, I'm a complete newbie, thanks.

I don't think it's an issue with overheating, I think the built-in Format option on the Deck Game Mode messes up the partition on the SD card.

I had GParted on a bootable USB flash drive as parted of the process of setting up dual-b

Here's the process:
1. Turn on your Steam Deck
2. Hit the 'Steam' button and go to 'Power' and select 'Switch to Desktop Mode'
3. In Desktop mode, click the Start button in the bottom left corner(Steam logo)
4. Select 'System', then off to the right select 'KDE Partition Manager'
5. Off to the left under 'Devices' it will show 2 options: 1 will be 'mmcblk0' and the other will be your internal SSD(named after the drive manufacturer. Mine says "KINGSTON")
6. By default the SD card(mmcblk0) should be selected. If not, select it.
[...]
Let me knew if you have any questions about the process.

Thanks a lot for this! This fixed the issue for me and now I have a constant speed of over 40 MB/s downloading directly onto the 1 TB Sandisk SD Card.

Only one issue I couldn't figure out. When I follow those steps I get a Lost & Found Directory that seems to block ~ 40 GB - it shows as "other" in the Steam Deck UI and I can't figure out how to free it up.

Tried to format the card a few times, tried to format in a Mac with a different partion and then again in KDE using the steps above. But it always ends up with that block of reserved space. I can't delete content in the folder if I try via Dolphin (I am not a Linux user, so a bit out of my comfort zone).

The only thing I haven't tried yet is "shredding". Of note, when I partition the card it all works fine but I get one error message when it wants to check the partition, but that seems to be a bug as the system mounts it right away (found a bug report after some googling), anyway any insights appreciated. With 1TB I have 890GB left of actual space I can use, so not too bad - and I rather take the loss with the much faster speed now, its so much more usable now.

[RoyalMetalKnights]

Originally posted by InsertValue:

Originally posted by RoyalMetalKnights:

I don't think it's an issue with overheating, I think the built-in Format option on the Deck Game Mode messes up the partition on the SD card.

I had GParted on a bootable USB flash drive as parted of the process of setting up dual-b

Here's the process:
1. Turn on your Steam Deck
2. Hit the 'Steam' button and go to 'Power' and select 'Switch to Desktop Mode'
3. In Desktop mode, click the Start button in the bottom left corner(Steam logo)
4. Select 'System', then off to the right select 'KDE Partition Manager'
5. Off to the left under 'Devices' it will show 2 options: 1 will be 'mmcblk0' and the other will be your internal SSD(named after the drive manufacturer. Mine says "KINGSTON")
6. By default the SD card(mmcblk0) should be selected. If not, select it.
[...]
Let me knew if you have any questions about the process.

Thanks a lot for this! This fixed the issue for me and now I have a constant speed of over 40 MB/s downloading directly onto the 1 TB Sandisk SD Card.

Only one issue I couldn't figure out. When I follow those steps I get a Lost & Found Directory that seems to block ~ 40 GB - it shows as "other" in the Steam Deck UI and I can't figure out how to free it up.

Tried to format the card a few times, tried to format in a Mac with a different partion and then again in KDE using the steps above. But it always ends up with that block of reserved space. I can't delete content in the folder if I try via Dolphin (I am not a Linux user, so a bit out of my comfort zone).

The only thing I haven't tried yet is "shredding". Of note, when I partition the card it all works fine but I get one error message when it wants to check the partition, but that seems to be a bug as the system mounts it right away (found a bug report after some googling), anyway any insights appreciated. With 1TB I have 890GB left of actual space I can use, so not too bad - and I rather take the loss with the much faster speed now, its so much more usable now.

I believe it's normal for a drive to reserve space, so you don't end up with the full usable storage amount. My 256GB SanDisk microSD ends up with 233.5GB in the SteamOS storage menu. This is after using either KDE Partition Manager or GParted.

I'm not very knowledgeable concerning Linux, either, but that's pretty much how most drives work. I have a 512GB NVMe in an external enclosure formatted to ntfs on Windows 10 and it's showing 476GB usable space. My main NVMe on my laptop shows 1.81GB usable on a 2TB drive.

I don't remember what my 256GB microSD said after using the Game Mode Format Tool, and I don't really want to test it since it has a proclivity to f**k up the SD cards, as shown by how many people are finding my obscure post in this thread and saying it's helping tremendously. Not to mention all the microSD cards it's nuking.

[InsertValue]

Thanks, just to clarify - this is additional blocked space on top that. It is a 1 TB card and I think usable space is somewhere around 930 GB which is what I had when formatting in game mode.

If I follow the steps above the file system is partitioned and I end up with a ~938 GB partition but then on top of that within the partition there is ~40GB actively already used up. In game mode this is shown as 40 GB being used by "Other" when I try to figure it out in file manager, the only folder I see is the Lost and Found so my guess is the lost and found uses an additional 40GB. I can't modify or see the content in it due to permissions issue in Desktop mode.

[NuLife]

i wish i had faster then 5mbs download in general, yall wana count urself lucky u don't get 5mbs as slandered lol

[RoyalMetalKnights]

Originally posted by InsertValue:

Thanks, just to clarify - this is additional blocked space on top that. It is a 1 TB card and I think usable space is somewhere around 930 GB which is what I had when formatting in game mode.

If I follow the steps above the file system is partitioned and I end up with a ~938 GB partition but then on top of that within the partition there is ~40GB actively already used up. In game mode this is shown as 40 GB being used by "Other" when I try to figure it out in file manager, the only folder I see is the Lost and Found so my guess is the lost and found uses an additional 40GB. I can't modify or see the content in it due to permissions issue in Desktop mode.

I see what you're talking about now. I have ~10GB being used out of the usable space left after creating a new partition on my 256GB card. This happens with both KDE Partition Manager and GParted. From what I've read, the Lost+Found folder is created by default as a part of the process making an ext4 partition and filesystem. Why the built-in tool doesn't have that present is a mystery to me. I'd have to see the script they use for their Format Tool.

Not to downplay the issue of the lost space, 40GB is a decent chuck of 930GB. In my case, 10GB is a decent tradeoff compared to waiting 10-12hrs to download a game, or having my card damaged by the Game Mode Format Tool. Somebody who's more knowledgeable about Linux would have to help us out.

There's a way to format as BTRFS that The Phawx covered on his channel. I don't have the time to try it right now, but it's possible that might mitigate the issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt-Y5DYy9mU

[Prezidentas]

the first seconds of file transfer might even be caching within RAM/SSD, perhaps the speed after a few seconds is the true speed of the card

[ba0701]

Originally posted by RoyalMetalKnights:

Originally posted by 亜双義一真:

Hey bro, I'm having the same problem as you, the SD card will overheat when downloading games and then the speed becomes 0 or very slow, could you please guide me on how to use GParted to make the SD card work better, I'm a complete newbie, thanks.

I don't think it's an issue with overheating, I think the built-in Format option on the Deck Game Mode messes up the partition on the SD card.

I had GParted on a bootable USB flash drive as parted of the process of setting up dual-boot for Windows. I also have a USB-C hub to plug it into the Deck along with a keyboard.

I can run you through all that, but first you should try formatting using KDE Partition Manager that's built into Steam Desktop Mode(aka KDE Plasma). I just tried it out on my card, and the speeds seem fine when I downloaded Left 4 Dead 2. Took about 10min to download, then another 2-3min to verify. That whole process would have taken hours when I used the Deck format option previously and my card was behaving weirdly.

Here's the process:
1. Turn on your Steam Deck
2. Hit the 'Steam' button and go to 'Power' and select 'Switch to Desktop Mode'
3. In Desktop mode, click the Start button in the bottom left corner(Steam logo)
4. Select 'System', then off to the right select 'KDE Partition Manager'
5. Off to the left under 'Devices' it will show 2 options: 1 will be 'mmcblk0' and the other will be your internal SSD(named after the drive manufacturer. Mine says "KINGSTON")
6. By default the SD card(mmcblk0) should be selected. If not, select it.
7. In the middle area of the program it will show your partitions. It will show the SD card partition and it should have a little blue box next to 'ext4' under type, a lock icon under mount, and the size and used space.
8. Using the right trackpad hover over it, then using the left trackpad click it. A drop-down menu will appear.
9. Select 'Unmount'
10. Click it again with the left trackpad and select 'Delete'. In the bottom of the program in the 'Pending Operations' box make sure it says "Delete partition". At this point you can undo this if it doesn't. Make sure it doesn't say "Shred", it should say 'Delete'.
11. If it says "Delete Partition", then in the top left of the program just below 'File' there's a button for 'Apply'. Click 'Apply'.
12. A pop-up will appear asking if you want to apply the Delete partition operation. Select 'Apply Pending Operations' button.
13. Operation will finish. Press 'OK'.
14. In the middle box it will now say 'unallocated', 'unknown', and the drive size.
15. Use the left trackpad to click it, and select 'New' from the drop-down menu.
16. In the pop-up, change the 'File System' option to 'ext4' and click 'OK'.
17. Press the 'Apply' button in the top left of the program
18. A pop-up will appear. Press the 'Apply Pending Operations' button.
19. It will take about 50secs to create a new ext4 partition. After it's done, the Desktop will pop-up a Disk & Devices alert showing a new SD was inserted. Just shrink this using the down-arrow in the bottom right corner.
20. Hit 'OK' on the box in KDE Partition Manager then close it.
21. Click the 'Return to Game Mode' button on the Desktop
22. Once you're in Game Mode, eject your SD card and re-insert it.
23. Click the Steam button and go to 'Settings'
24. Scroll down to 'Storage' and click it. It should show your 'Internal Drive' and 'MicroSD Card'. The MicroSD Card should have a gold star next to it, meaning it's the default installation drive. If not, select it and hit 'X' to 'Make Default'.
25. Install a game then hit the Steam menu button and go to 'Downloads' to watch the progress, download speed, and disk usage speed.

I downloaded Left 4 Dead 2 and it starts off really fast and has high disk usage(around 70MB/s). Then it as it installs it will drop down to around 20MB/s for most the install, then speed up again at the end. The download took about 10min to download 8GB and install 14GB, then it took another 3-4min to verify the installation. It never went to zero like before. Before it would take hours to install a game. For bigger games like God of War I was having to leave the Deck on overnight. Now it should be normal again. A 10-14GB game like Left 4 Dead 2 should take ~15min total. A bigger game like God of War should take maybe an hour.

Let me knew if you have any questions about the process.

So, I followed your instructions to a T, and have done so twice. The first time, with a 512GB Micro SD card, worked perfectly, and that is my currently installed card. However, I had a 1TB Sandisk Extreme card in my Switch, and I decided to use it in the Deck. I first put the card into my PC, and copied all of the data, went perfect. I put the card into the Deck, it allowed me to delete the existing partition as outlined in your steps, however this is where things went off the rails.

After deleting the original partition, the Deck allowed me to create a new one, but the option for "New" is greyed out, only the option for "New Partition" allowed me to select it. I did so, and the Deck has since refused to allow me to do anything else with the card, other than delete the existing partition (which it does appear to do), and recreating it. The Deck will not allow me to format or even mount the card.

So, I decided to put the card back into my PC, to run a scan on the cylinders, which I did with two separate apps (TestDisk and Disk Genius). Even after having deleted the partition on the Deck (yes, I applied the changes), both of these programs see the existing partition as an EXT4 partition. I was able to scan the card in both apps, and both returned that there were no errors found, yet I cannot delete the partition, or format it, nor can I do anything with the card in the Deck. So, it seems I have somehow bricked my card, but not sure how, given the card appears fine under any tests I am able to run on it, but nothing is allowing me to delete the Deck created partition, or format it. I'd be happy if I could just restore the ExFat partition that existed, but I can't undo what I have done on the Deck.

Anyone, with a deeper knowledge of Linux than my newb level of understanding, that might be able to provide an assist? I hate the thought of not using a $180 card, especially when the card does not show any errors. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

[Prezidentas]

There is this Windows utility I used to use - BOOTICE. You could try it to reformat the partitions. My flash drive would lock up after flashing Linux live CDs on it and couldn't get reformatted, but BOOTICE always fixed it.

[RoyalMetalKnights]

@ba0701

Sorry to hear that. If the other recommendations don't work, you might try AOMEI Partition Assistant free version and do a 'Quick Check' and then a 'Wipe Partition'. The "quick" Wipe might take 6-10hrs. on that 1TB, but it's worth a shot to try to save a nice 1TB card like that.

I did it on my 256GB card and it took about 2-3hrs. It writes zeroes to the whole card after deleting it. This way should be sure to erase any data on the card. I tried formatting to ext4 using AOMEI, but the Deck was only reading it as 2.9GB instead of 233GB. I was able to use KDE Partition to delete and add a ext4 partition and it worked fine.

If you're able to successfully wipe the partition and any data using BOOTICE or AOMEI, I don't recommend putting that card back into your Deck. If it works, just use it in your Switch. If you are determined to use it in the Deck, then try to format on your PC. Just don't do the Deck again, for some reason it's not playing nice with that card.

Good luck.

[MJ711]

Originally posted by RoyalMetalKnights:

Originally posted by 亜双義一真:

Hey bro, I'm having the same problem as you, the SD card will overheat when downloading games and then the speed becomes 0 or very slow, could you please guide me on how to use GParted to make the SD card work better, I'm a complete newbie, thanks.

I don't think it's an issue with overheating, I think the built-in Format option on the Deck Game Mode messes up the partition on the SD card.

I had GParted on a bootable USB flash drive as parted of the process of setting up dual-boot for Windows. I also have a USB-C hub to plug it into the Deck along with a keyboard.

I can run you through all that, but first you should try formatting using KDE Partition Manager that's built into Steam Desktop Mode(aka KDE Plasma). I just tried it out on my card, and the speeds seem fine when I downloaded Left 4 Dead 2. Took about 10min to download, then another 2-3min to verify. That whole process would have taken hours when I used the Deck format option previously and my card was behaving weirdly.

Here's the process:
1. Turn on your Steam Deck
2. Hit the 'Steam' button and go to 'Power' and select 'Switch to Desktop Mode'
3. In Desktop mode, click the Start button in the bottom left corner(Steam logo)
4. Select 'System', then off to the right select 'KDE Partition Manager'
5. Off to the left under 'Devices' it will show 2 options: 1 will be 'mmcblk0' and the other will be your internal SSD(named after the drive manufacturer. Mine says "KINGSTON")
6. By default the SD card(mmcblk0) should be selected. If not, select it.
7. In the middle area of the program it will show your partitions. It will show the SD card partition and it should have a little blue box next to 'ext4' under type, a lock icon under mount, and the size and used space.
8. Using the right trackpad hover over it, then using the left trackpad click it. A drop-down menu will appear.
9. Select 'Unmount'
10. Click it again with the left trackpad and select 'Delete'. In the bottom of the program in the 'Pending Operations' box make sure it says "Delete partition". At this point you can undo this if it doesn't. Make sure it doesn't say "Shred", it should say 'Delete'.
11. If it says "Delete Partition", then in the top left of the program just below 'File' there's a button for 'Apply'. Click 'Apply'.
12. A pop-up will appear asking if you want to apply the Delete partition operation. Select 'Apply Pending Operations' button.
13. Operation will finish. Press 'OK'.
14. In the middle box it will now say 'unallocated', 'unknown', and the drive size.
15. Use the left trackpad to click it, and select 'New' from the drop-down menu.
16. In the pop-up, change the 'File System' option to 'ext4' and click 'OK'.
17. Press the 'Apply' button in the top left of the program
18. A pop-up will appear. Press the 'Apply Pending Operations' button.
19. It will take about 50secs to create a new ext4 partition. After it's done, the Desktop will pop-up a Disk & Devices alert showing a new SD was inserted. Just shrink this using the down-arrow in the bottom right corner.
20. Hit 'OK' on the box in KDE Partition Manager then close it.
21. Click the 'Return to Game Mode' button on the Desktop
22. Once you're in Game Mode, eject your SD card and re-insert it.
23. Click the Steam button and go to 'Settings'
24. Scroll down to 'Storage' and click it. It should show your 'Internal Drive' and 'MicroSD Card'. The MicroSD Card should have a gold star next to it, meaning it's the default installation drive. If not, select it and hit 'X' to 'Make Default'.
25. Install a game then hit the Steam menu button and go to 'Downloads' to watch the progress, download speed, and disk usage speed.

I downloaded Left 4 Dead 2 and it starts off really fast and has high disk usage(around 70MB/s). Then it as it installs it will drop down to around 20MB/s for most the install, then speed up again at the end. The download took about 10min to download 8GB and install 14GB, then it took another 3-4min to verify the installation. It never went to zero like before. Before it would take hours to install a game. For bigger games like God of War I was having to leave the Deck on overnight. Now it should be normal again. A 10-14GB game like Left 4 Dead 2 should take ~15min total. A bigger game like God of War should take maybe an hour.

Let me knew if you have any questions about the process.

this is the way

[ba0701]

Originally posted by Red Star Gopnik:

There is this Windows utility I used to use - BOOTICE. You could try it to reformat the partitions. My flash drive would lock up after flashing Linux live CDs on it and couldn't get reformatted, but BOOTICE always fixed it.

Thank you, I will look into BOOTICE, it is worth a shot at this point.

Originally posted by RoyalMetalKnights:

@ba0701

Sorry to hear that. If the other recommendations don't work, you might try AOMEI Partition Assistant free version and do a 'Quick Check' and then a 'Wipe Partition'. The "quick" Wipe might take 6-10hrs. on that 1TB, but it's worth a shot to try to save a nice 1TB card like that.

I did it on my 256GB card and it took about 2-3hrs. It writes zeroes to the whole card after deleting it. This way should be sure to erase any data on the card. I tried formatting to ext4 using AOMEI, but the Deck was only reading it as 2.9GB instead of 233GB. I was able to use KDE Partition to delete and add a ext4 partition and it worked fine.

If you're able to successfully wipe the partition and any data using BOOTICE or AOMEI, I don't recommend putting that card back into your Deck. If it works, just use it in your Switch. If you are determined to use it in the Deck, then try to format on your PC. Just don't do the Deck again, for some reason it's not playing nice with that card.

Good luck.

To be clear I was in no way trying to blame you, or hold you accountable for what has happened, I followed your directions exactly as you had so succinctly reported them to us, and only wanted to relay that as I was explaining what happened. It is people being helpful that got me to buy my first laptop in 1995, and I met friends that I still have to this day along the way. So, thank you for taking your time to write all of that!

I did try the AOMEI yesterday, the free version, and when I ran a scan, it went strait to telling me I need the paid version. Having been sucked into buying something many years ago, some sort of maintenance app not unlike AOMEI, only to find that it still did not resolve my issue, so I have been hesitant with such tactics since. However, I made a GPARTED boot disk thumb drive last night, and it is experiencing the exact same issues. I try to delete the EXT4 partition, it appears to do just that, and the next time I attempt to do anything with the drive, like create a new partition, it tells me the EXT4 partition must be deleted, and when I try to replace the existing partition with a second different type of partition, it tells me I cannot have two parallel partitions. I then left it scanning the card for 15 hours, at which point I have decided my card is simply unusable anymore. The line at the bottom of the screen just continuously moved back and forth across the screen for all 15 hours, with no indication anything has happened.


So, I may try BOOTICE, but I am closing in on the point of depositing this card into the recepticle. Whatever happened on the Deck, it seems is unfinished, and unable to be removed. Thank you to everyone for all of your help!