How well do microSD cards play modern games on the deck?

[KFCBUCKETS9000]

I want to get the second deck model, but it doesn't seem like enough space. And I'm having trouble believing a microSD card will play games fine. Cyberpunk 2077 sometimes struggles on my normal HDD drive.

[Mahjik]

It's very game dependent. The most noticeable difference is during load screens, with the initial start up usually being the biggest hit. Once running, most games you won't notice anything different.

[yokoshlomo]

Originally posted by DOOMGUY64:

I want to get the second deck model, but it doesn't seem like enough space. And I'm having trouble believing a microSD card will play games fine. Cyberpunk 2077 sometimes struggles on my normal HDD drive.

Back when I got mine, I've run Witcher 3 for test purposes from the SD Card for about 30mins and didnt notice anything.

Probably the loading times might have been a bit longer compared to the internal drive, didnt go the extra mile to test this, hence I was interested in the performance.

And depending on the SD Card, they easily read/write up to 3 times faster than a HDD.

[Haruspex]

Above comments are correct.

One thing about the Steam Deck is that it's brought to light just how many poor quality and even outright fake SD cards there are out there. Shop carefully. A 1 TB SD card for $20 is in fact too good to be true.

If you're thinking of getting the 64 GB version, 1 TB NVME drive replacements are good and cheap now, relatively. Here's the one I put into my Deck.[www.amazon.com] It cost about as much as a good micro SD card of the same capacity would cost. It works beautifully. I put a 512 GB SD card in there as well primarily for emulation.

[retro_Ed]

Ratchet & Clank : Rift Apart. It is truly a stress test for storage loading speeds.
I am running that game from microSD card and yes, it has a couple of seconds of loading time in some situations. Still highly recommended (...not the cheapest ones...).

I payed about 35€ / 512Gb microSD Samsung EVO Plus card.
And Installing was 5seconds + formatting time.

[GoalieG]

I have Madden 22 playing off the SD card, and don't notice a difference from it being loaded on the Steam Deck itself.

[.EteRnal.]

I am using a 512 GB PNY Premier-X A2 SD Card and so far everything on it runs flawlessly.

[Dynamonic]

I use SanDisk Extreme cards in my Deck and have not noticed any noticeable differences in load times between the Deck's internal SSD and my MicroSD cards.

If a game specifically recommends an SSD though, I tend to prioritise installing that on my Deck's internal storage just in case.

[Murasakino Rin]

i install everything to my SD card, i have no problems using it for everything i have put onto my deck.

basically treating it like a normal mech drive.

[Ballin Beast]

This is an old thread, but I use my microsd card to hold games that I will soon/eventually play. I move the games to my ssd when I want to play them. 104MB/s is equal to an internet speed of 832Mbits per second so it moves most games pretty quick

[invision2212]

Micro sd cards can play games normally fine but they will take much longer to load. Don’t install open world games tho that will access the sd card non stop as it will introduce stuttering

[Zerorecoil23]

Originally posted by invision2212:

Micro sd cards can play games normally fine but they will take much longer to load. Don’t install open world games tho that will access the sd card non stop as it will introduce stuttering

i installed openworld game like Cyberpunk 2077 + dlc phantom liberty on my 512 gb sd card, perfectly run smooth, first start i though loading will take a minutes but turn out only take less than 20s, i set on graphic custom base on steamdeck preset and little bit tweak for quality, crowd density low. it still smooth