Steam Deck - Should I buy large SD card for it?

[Johnny[HUN]]

I pre-ordered the 512 gb Steam Deck, but its not too much space for me, so I thought I buy an 1 tb micro/sd card to upgrade the storage, but then I thought wait a minute, will it be the same as the HDD on my current PC? I mean I know sd card wont be as fast as the nvme SSD, but if its slower than my current HDD, then is it worth the money at all? My HDD currently is a "Toshiba dt01aca300", but I am not so satisfied with the write/read speeed, but for gaming its perfect.

In the Nintendo Switch I dont see any backfire from using SD card, but that one is made with the idea of using only sd card, while Steam Deck is a PC, not meant to be used from the SD card, and I guess the port for an SD card is for movies or pictures to watch, but correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks for the help!

[WarnerCK]

Originally posted by Johnny:

In the Nintendo Switch I dont see any backfire from using SD card, but that one is made with the idea of using only sd card, while Steam Deck is a PC, not meant to be used from the SD card, and I guess the port for an SD card is for movies or pictures to watch, but correct me if I am wrong.

The SD card in the Deck is absolutely intended to hold your games.

Loading times will be longer if the game is on the SD card, but gameplay performance will be exactly the same. If you check the IGN coverage from when they went to Valve HQ, all of the games they played were running off the SD card. The later hands-on with multiple media outlets were probably running off the SD card, although it wasn't confirmed. All found the loading times to be fine, and faster than the Switch when they did the comparison.

[🦜Cloud Boy🦜]

In most cases you won't notice any difference except for the leading time. Games will load in to your RAM first, then run from there. Some open world games said to run better from faster storage, but it's barely noticeable. Slower storage works just fine.

[nullable]

I mean I run a ton of games from an SD card on my Nintendo Switch. It's not like anything really special is going on there. And people run programs from phones and tables all the time from SD cards.

Having an x86 based CPU in your device doesn't make that unreasonable.

As for speeds, sure SD card speeds are modest. No contest for a SSD, but compared to an HDD it's not a bad compromise between peak bandwidth and IOps. HDDs can go faster under the right conditions, but often won't under typical condition because of limited IOps.

[Johnny[HUN]]

Originally posted by Snakub Plissken:

I mean I run a ton of games from an SD card on my Nintendo Switch. It's not like anything really special is going on there. And people run programs from phones and tables all the time from SD cards.

Having an x86 based CPU in your device doesn't make that unreasonable.

As for speeds, sure SD card speeds are modest. No contest for a SSD, but compared to an HDD it's not a bad compromise between peak bandwidth and IOps. HDDs can go faster under the right conditions, but often won't under typical condition because of limited IOps.

also there are different SD cards that have different speed, but I dont understand them, I mean i bought a "c10 v30 " sd card, that supposed to be much faster than the normal ones, but it seems like the Switch can't make any difference because all the games have the same loading times. Maybe the Steam Deck won't be able to handle better sd cards and then its not worth the extra money, I couldn't find any answer for that but I feel like people wont really care about it.

By the way, if Steam Deck will be a PC basically, does it mean I can even use external SSD-s through USB port? Maybe thats a better option then for extra storage, right?

[Omega]

Originally posted by Johnny:

Originally posted by Snakub Plissken:

I mean I run a ton of games from an SD card on my Nintendo Switch. It's not like anything really special is going on there. And people run programs from phones and tables all the time from SD cards.

Having an x86 based CPU in your device doesn't make that unreasonable.

As for speeds, sure SD card speeds are modest. No contest for a SSD, but compared to an HDD it's not a bad compromise between peak bandwidth and IOps. HDDs can go faster under the right conditions, but often won't under typical condition because of limited IOps.

also there are different SD cards that have different speed, but I dont understand them, I mean i bought a "c10 v30 " sd card, that supposed to be much faster than the normal ones, but it seems like the Switch can't make any difference because all the games have the same loading times. Maybe the Steam Deck won't be able to handle better sd cards and then its not worth the extra money, I couldn't find any answer for that but I feel like people wont really care about it.

By the way, if Steam Deck will be a PC basically, does it mean I can even use external SSD-s through USB port? Maybe thats a better option then for extra storage, right?

You could use an external SSD over USB. But that would not be ideal when using the device portable. A quality SD card can be plenty fast.

[Electric Cupcake]

Each card has a speed rating number stamped on it. The rankings technically are based specifically on video read/writes, but can be applied to general data transfer rates.
https://www.sdcard.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/video_speed-class_01.png

Of course, data rates are also dependent on the file system and block size and whatnot, and it's unlikely the SD association has ext4 volumes in mind when granting the ratings.

The Steam Deck probably can work with exFAT and NTFS sd cards for storing your media files and stuff, but if you're planning on running games off it, it'll most likely have to be ext4.

[Omega]

For filesystem I recommend F2FS which is intended for these use cases. It should perform significantly better than other filesystems.

Do not use exFAT or NTFS. exFAT is a very simplistic filesystem and will deliver poor performance. NTFS support is Linux is currently still medicre, and it's just a horrible file system overal.

[nullable]

Originally posted by Johnny:

Originally posted by Snakub Plissken:

I mean I run a ton of games from an SD card on my Nintendo Switch. It's not like anything really special is going on there. And people run programs from phones and tables all the time from SD cards.

Having an x86 based CPU in your device doesn't make that unreasonable.

As for speeds, sure SD card speeds are modest. No contest for a SSD, but compared to an HDD it's not a bad compromise between peak bandwidth and IOps. HDDs can go faster under the right conditions, but often won't under typical condition because of limited IOps.

also there are different SD cards that have different speed, but I dont understand them, I mean i bought a "c10 v30 " sd card, that supposed to be much faster than the normal ones, but it seems like the Switch can't make any difference because all the games have the same loading times. Maybe the Steam Deck won't be able to handle better sd cards and then its not worth the extra money, I couldn't find any answer for that but I feel like people wont really care about it.

By the way, if Steam Deck will be a PC basically, does it mean I can even use external SSD-s through USB port? Maybe thats a better option then for extra storage, right?

Aye the Switch doesn't support the additional speeds of many of the fastest cards. I think it's only UHS-I, so UHS-II and UHS-III cards would really have no benefit. I went down a rabbit hole looking that up last year. If you put at UHS-II or faster card into a device that only supports UHS-I it'll run at UHS-I speeds. Like if you put fast RAM in a slow that only supports 2133Mhz.

[ugafan]

Originally posted by Crosseyed Mie:

The Steam Deck probably can work with exFAT and NTFS sd cards for storing your media files and stuff, but if you're planning on running games off it, it'll most likely have to be ext4.

"What file system format does the microSD card use on Steam Deck?

Steam Deck microSD cards use ext4 with casefolding - Steam Deck formats SD cards to the proper format."

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/faq

[Electric Cupcake]

On a related note, can the TSA detect a USB stick or SD card up the butt?

Asking for a friend.

[Omega]

Originally posted by ugafan:

Originally posted by Crosseyed Mie:

The Steam Deck probably can work with exFAT and NTFS sd cards for storing your media files and stuff, but if you're planning on running games off it, it'll most likely have to be ext4.

"What file system format does the microSD card use on Steam Deck?

Steam Deck microSD cards use ext4 with casefolding - Steam Deck formats SD cards to the proper format."

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/faq

At the end of the day you are the one who has full control over how it will be formatted. It runs Linux and is not some locked down console.

Casefolding is for Windows game compatibility. Windows filesystems are not case sensitive and thus a program might look for "Start.exe" instead of "start.exe", on Windows this makes no difference, on Linux it does, Linux will say that those are two different filenames.

Casefolding is not required, but optional, it can improve game support for games which are programmed with inconsistent casing usage in filenames.

[Johnny[HUN]]

Originally posted by Omega:

Originally posted by ugafan:

"What file system format does the microSD card use on Steam Deck?

Steam Deck microSD cards use ext4 with casefolding - Steam Deck formats SD cards to the proper format."

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/faq

At the end of the day you are the one who has full control over how it will be formatted. It runs Linux and is not some locked down console.

Casefolding is for Windows game compatibility. Windows filesystems are not case sensitive and thus a program might look for "Start.exe" instead of "start.exe", on Windows this makes no difference, on Linux it does, Linux will say that those are two different filenames.

Casefolding is not required, but optional, it can improve game support for games which are programmed with inconsistent casing usage in filenames.

but you can completly wipe the default OP system and you can install windows, at least thats what I've heard. I am curious to see if the Steam Deck OP system with proton how will behave, or its better to install windows and then a virtual machine with the Steam OS

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Windows won't be a good option on the Steam Deck simply due to how much space its going to need. Any Linux distro with everything needed for gaming is going to be very light weight in overall used disk space in general compared to Win10 or 11.

[Johnny[HUN]]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Windows won't be a good option on the Steam Deck simply due to how much space its going to need. Any Linux distro with everything needed for gaming is going to be very light weight in overall used disk space in general compared to Win10 or 11.

I have doubts about this proton-linux stuff. I mean, in theory its great, but we'll see how it works actually. I will recieve my Steam Deck in Q2-3 2022, so the early birds who recieve this year will tell us how great it is, i am excited, I stopped buying Nintendo Switch game since Steam Deck announced :D

[Omega]

Originally posted by Johnny:

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Windows won't be a good option on the Steam Deck simply due to how much space its going to need. Any Linux distro with everything needed for gaming is going to be very light weight in overall used disk space in general compared to Win10 or 11.

I have doubts about this proton-linux stuff. I mean, in theory its great, but we'll see how it works actually. I will recieve my Steam Deck in Q2-3 2022, so the early birds who recieve this year will tell us how great it is, i am excited, I stopped buying Nintendo Switch game since Steam Deck announced :D

You can try Proton right now, it has been available for a few years already on Steam for Linux.