Better SD Worth it?

[....]

There are tons of articles etc. about this topic but none of them really seems to give me the information i actually need:

What is the difference? Is it really only:
- write/read speeds (limited by the steamdeck itself)

And what does that mean - does this also impact performance of some games (FPS, Texture-Pop-in etc.)? Or is it really only faster download/install etc.?

For example - is the only difference between a SanDisk Extreme to a SanDisk Ultra faster download/install and maybe saving a little bit faster or can this also affect performance - are there even games that require good write speeds (maybe procedural open world games?)?


To be honest paying premium just to have the one time download and some updates faster seems to be not worth it for me - or is there more?

[Star]

whats important is not the read and write for the steam deck its the iops!

get a evo card a2 with 4.000 iops and ur good. not costing to much eaither.

[V𝐢𝐧𝐢gas Ba𝗸𝗸 🫎]

Buy SD card with at least A1. Higher A2 bandwidth is unused by sd card reader.

For cameras readwrites are important. For PCs, randoms IOPS are important.

[....]

Originally posted by Star:

whats important is not the read and write for the steam deck its the iops!

get a evo card a2 with 4.000 iops and ur good. not costing to much eaither.

Okay - so what will be the real life difference between a SanDisk Ultra and Extreme? Extreme probably has more IOPS but what does it even do in daily use?

Also does the Steamdeck even support A2?


Again - lets just take a simple example, SanDisk Ultra - vs whatever is the best SD-Card?
- from what ive read this card already is over the max read speed the steamdeck can use - the only downside is the write speed which doesnt really matter besides installing etc.?

What am i missing? People tell me about IOPS etc. but what is the real life benefit of it? Why is it worth the extra money? (i really dont care if that 1 time download takes longer or not)

[Star]

Originally posted by ....:

Originally posted by Star:

whats important is not the read and write for the steam deck its the iops!

get a evo card a2 with 4.000 iops and ur good. not costing to much eaither.

Okay - so what will be the real life difference between a SanDisk Ultra and Extreme? Extreme probably has more IOPS but what does it even do in daily use?

Also does the Steamdeck even support A2?


Again - lets just take a simple example, SanDisk Ultra - vs whatever is the best SD-Card?
- from what ive read this card already is over the max read speed the steamdeck can use - the only downside is the write speed which doesnt really matter besides installing etc.?

What am i missing? People tell me about IOPS etc. but what is the real life benefit of it? Why is it worth the extra money? (i really dont care if that 1 time download takes longer or not)

iops is the in and out of ur sd card 1500 a1 vs a2 4000 = loading time and download speed will vary aloot. and games with many small writes will perform better.

You do not need sandisk ultra or extreme.

Simple samsung evolution blue card a2 = good enough
its cheap too like 50 euro for 512gb

[pixelcowboy79]

Biggest difference you are going to see is on Write speeds, which will only affect installation times and when moving/copying files. I do recommend that you go for the biggest card you can possibly afford, as space will be more important. The Sandisk Ultra and the Lexar Play are the best value for money at 1tb. If you only play smaller indy games or emulators get a 512gb, but at that price point the price difference between those cards and a Sandisk extreme isn't that big, and you will get much better write speeds with the Extreme. I own both a 256gb SandDisk Extreme and a 1tb Lexar Play and yes, the SanDisk Extreme installs games faster, but in real life use they are basically the same thing.

[Andrius227]

Dont forget sd cards are hot swappable on the deck so you might save money by buying a couple of smaller cards instead of a single big card.

[....]

Thanks for the tips - i think i will pick the normal ultra card.

I already got a 512GB one but thats just not enough - some games require almost 100GB alone (Forza for example) i was also thinking about swapping SDs but i would prefer to not have to do that.

[D I A B L O]

Well if your deck is thermal throttling then it won't really matter much
I dunno
I got the same question because they state some 512GB models come with a slower sd card connection

So unless the benchmarks state which one they sre using....

[zBeeble]

What's difficult here, and what's generating all the discussion is the crap-tonne of things between you and the datapoints you want. First, in a manner of explaining:

ALL FLASH MEDIA are tiny computers. In fact, ALL STORAGE DEVICES have been tiny computers for 20 years or more. The last storage to be rather directly connected to computers were floppies (hard drives stopped being directly connected as PATA was sold (and SCSI were already little computers).

So you have the speed of the medium (be it spinning rust or minute charges held in cells) ... which has a number of aspects. Then you have the speed of the micro controller to fetch and relay that information. Then you have the speed of the interface(s) to relay that information to the host computer. In the way, also, you may have cache DRAM and/or SRAM (depending on the device) ... which may reside on the processor/SOC and may reside on companion chips.

So... then you can compose your tests --- random 512 byte IOPS or 4K IOPS... or streaming or read or write.

Did you know that both modern SD media and SMR hard drives cannot just write an arbitrary block --- the both need to blank a whole area (possibly moving valid data before hand) to then write out new data. Your testing and your usage of the drive can occur during one of these transfers. And these transfers all-the-while are consuming media bandwidth, cache memory and processor attention.

This is all to say that the performance measurement is a dog's breakfast --- the "winner" is going to depend on the task.

"So..." then-you-say "tell me about my workload..." ... but what is your workload? What games, specifically. How do they organise their data? How often do they write? How large/small/scattered ... etc are their reads? How much does the 16G RAM in the deck get to mitigate this, too?

Generally, for games, IOPS seem better. That's an overall reasonable statement. It is going to favour some of the most expensive NVMe. Why? Because they have good processor power (expensive) and good search performance (again expensive).

Another detour: do you know why almost nobody defrags their hard drive these days? In the spinning rust days, blocks were mostly stored in order. Blocks did get relocated, but not often. So grouping data with other data made sense because seeking was a real thing. But with SSD memory, finding a block is more like a database lookup. In a sense, building extreme performance SDDs requires research into how best to EMULATE a file of sectors with the memory and resources on hand on an SSD. So defraging is simply meaningless work that may actually scatter your blocks more and may actually SLOW DOWN your drive. It's effect would be entirely random, in essence.

So... which SSD to buy? It's not like there are a lot of choices. Last I looked on Amazon there were only a handful. In general, larger SSDs are faster. This is actually true for hard drives, too (the faster the bits pass under the head, the faster the drive). It's not like SSDs have heads, but in general (and all generalities are false, including this one) larger SSDs, all things being equal, are faster.

Or you could just wait for people to test and review... because they might know more than you ... or they might have more time and money to splash around for testing than you ...

YMMV.

[Heron]

I have a 64 GB Steam Deck and a SanDisk Ultra 512 GB.

SanDisk Ultra works just fine. I'm under the impression that the slow A1 write speed bottlenecks my installation speed (who cares), apart from that it works flawlessly. Games load fast and play well. I can't tell a difference to the internal storage.

[retrogunner]

Originally posted by Andrius227:

Dont forget sd cards are hot swappable on the deck so you might save money by buying a couple of smaller cards instead of a single big card.

Ya. Valve shows/says that. It's a personal choice to do it that way. YMMV. That's an iffy proposal on Linux based hosts. You run the risk of frying the SD card's formatted data.

When you properly umount/eject media on Linux, it performs a 'sync' command to flush the disk buffers. Even Windows does a similar thing. It also checks to makes sure there are no open file handles & processes. Then you can "hot-swap" an unused device if designed to.

Personally, to ensure you SD Card has a reduced risk of "removal frying", I power it off (I don't have a bunch of cards, just one.) - that is until Valve creates Steam > Settings > Storage > eject like Android. I'm using some caution to avoid the life experience of losing $$ & re-download time.

[Marlock]

Linux Mint has a "eject" button for removeable media, which triggers the sync command then unmounts it, making it perfectly safe to swap (just like on windows too)... doesn't SteamOS 3 have a similar feature, at least in desktop mode?!

[Andrius227]

Originally posted by retrogunner:

Originally posted by Andrius227:

Dont forget sd cards are hot swappable on the deck so you might save money by buying a couple of smaller cards instead of a single big card.

Ya. Valve shows/says that. It's a personal choice to do it that way. YMMV. That's an iffy proposal on Linux based hosts. You run the risk of frying the SD card's formatted data.

When you properly umount/eject media on Linux, it performs a 'sync' command to flush the disk buffers. Even Windows does a similar thing. It also checks to makes sure there are no open file handles & processes. Then you can "hot-swap" an unused device if designed to.

Personally, to ensure you SD Card has a reduced risk of "removal frying", I power it off (I don't have a bunch of cards, just one.) - that is until Valve creates Steam > Settings > Storage > eject like Android. I'm using some caution to avoid the life experience of losing $$ & re-download time.

Game data can be redownloaded so i would not worry about it.