Installing Steam on a Micro SD Card?

[msierra185]

Hi, I was thinking of playing Steam on a Lenovo laptop that I've got recently. However since that storage size is really small (Max is 56.9 GB), I was thinking of using a micro SD card which is 128 GB to install Steam on so I don't have to use so much space on my laptop.

But is it a good idea to have Steam installed on micro SD card or any kind of external storage drive instead of installing it on the computer itself?

[RemyXIII®]

Removable drives are not recommended for Steam as they cause all sorts of issues.

[msierra185]

Originally posted by DA|Astelan:

Removable drives are not recommended for Steam as they cause all sorts of issues.

What kind of issues?

[RemyXIII®]

Originally posted by msierra185:

Hi, I was thinking of playing Steam on a Lenovo laptop that I've got recently. However since that storage size is really small (Max is 56.9 GB), I was thinking of using a micro SD card which is 128 GB to install Steam on so I don't have to use so much space on my laptop.

But is it a good idea to have Steam installed on micro SD card or any kind of external storage drive instead of installing it on the computer itself?

Does your laptop have room inside for an additional HDD or SSD/M.2/NVME? That would be a much better option.

[msierra185]

Originally posted by politediligence:

Performance issues, Steam not recognizing your installed games, corrupted files if the drive is unexpectedly ejected or disconnected.

Ok. I was intending of leaving the SD card in the laptop.

[RemyXIII®]

Originally posted by msierra185:

Originally posted by politediligence:

Performance issues, Steam not recognizing your installed games, corrupted files if the drive is unexpectedly ejected or disconnected.

Ok. I was intending of leaving the SD card in the laptop.

You will still have performance issues as the card is not an integral part of your system.

[msierra185]

Originally posted by DA|Astelan:

Does your laptop have room inside for an additional HDD or SSD/M.2/NVME? That would be a much better option.

I honestly don't know since it's a Lenovo Ideapad Slim, my dad bought it so he could hook it up to the TV so we could watch Netflix but he got Amazon Fire TV so he gave it to me.

[RemyXIII®]

Originally posted by msierra185:

Originally posted by DA|Astelan:

Does your laptop have room inside for an additional HDD or SSD/M.2/NVME? That would be a much better option.

I honestly don't know since it's a Lenovo Ideapad Slim, my dad bought it so he could hook it up to the TV so we could watch Netflix but he got Amazon Fire TV so he gave it to me.

Ah...that's like a $200-300 laptop so I highly doubt it.

[msierra185]

Originally posted by DA|Astelan:

Ah...that's like a $200-300 laptop so I highly doubt it.

But the games I would play on it are those 32 bit sprite games that I can't play on my Mac since I've updated to Catalina. I figure that would work since they would be sprite games but I'm not sure now...

[nullable]

Originally posted by DA|Astelan:

Originally posted by msierra185:

Ok. I was intending of leaving the SD card in the laptop.

You will still have performance issues as the card is not an integral part of your system.

I would disagree microSD cards often have better performance than HDDs. The biggest issue is it being removable media and how Steam behaves when a drive becomes disconnected.

[Snapjak]

My biggest concern would be the reliability of the SD card itself. They're not exactly... sturdy or meant for long-term storage.

Granted yes they are faster than a mechanical in most situations I'd prefer an external HDD/SDD over USB 3 if you can.

[RemyXIII®]

Yeah. Agreed. SD Cards have a read/write limit before failure and were not meant for continual access.

[Nepgear]

I have Steam on a mSD card on my laptop and it works fine. I just had to create a symbolic link to it on the main drive because it was reinstalling itself to the main drive every Steam update.

[nullable]

Well I'd point to the Nintendo Switch, phones, tablets etc, using microSD cards. It's fine for all those computing devices, what makes an x86 laptop special exactly? It kind seems like it's not an ideal or optimal solution in your heads and you're kind of moving the goalposts around to see what sticks.

I would agree a SSD would be a lot better. But reading around it seems like modern microSDs are plenty durable with lifetime ratings measured in tens of thousands of hours of use, or tens of thousands of write cycles and warranties of 5-10 years.

This kinda sounds like SSD FUD from five years ago, repackaged for microSD's really. But if you've got hard evidence of the extreme fragility of microSD cards I'm all for it.

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/memory-cards/microsdxc-evo-plus-memory-card-w--adapter-128gb--2017-model--mb-mc128ga-am/

Warranty
Product

Limited 10 year warranty. * Warranty not valid when used in dashcam, CCTV, surveillance camera and other write-intensive devices. * Warranty for SD adapter is limited to 1 year.

I mean as far as I know Steam isn't writing as much data continually to disk as a always on camera as described above. But maybe you know something I don't there. Although I'm not really interesting in arguing about the definition of "write-intensive" either. I just think you're overestimating how much writing is going to occur. I'm not going to fault you guys for being cautious. But it is possible to be a little overly cautious too, especially when you're filling in data gaps with intuition.

[RemyXIII®]

I forgot about Class 10 cards...that actually may be a viable option

[Snapjak]

But most people won't be buying those sort of SD cards, they'll get the cheapest thing from Wallyworld or the equivalent store. Those are the ones I have issues with.