this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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MicroSD cards are crazy slow compared to all other storage, this doesnt seem like a good idea
I did some test on my deck when I first got it seeing the difference in load times when a game was installed on its m.2 SSD vs a Micro SD card and the difference was there but pretty negligible. a long load time that took 16 seconds on SSD took 18 on Micro SD. It isn't something I'd personally notice unless I was timing it.
This heavily depends on the game. Which game were you testing?
In my experience at least, small Indies and last-gen or earlier ports from console are fine, but games with frequent loading times and those designed for SSDs benefit from being installed to the internal storage.
Manufacturers have wildly oversold you on how much speed you need to run a game. I use my SD card for almost all of my games on my steam deck none of them have any problems loading none of them load slowly.
Games are very good about preloading assets before they're needed
Microsoft is at least partly responsibile for this. Modern Windows loves to dominate your hard drive with background tasks that you didn't ask for, to the point of leaving foreground tasks starved for I/O.
I find Linux to be superior in this area, and I often run modern games from a slow mechanical hard drive with no trouble at all. It's unsurprising that your Steam Deck does just fine with an SD card.
Yeah, I have Steam installed on an SSD in my Kubuntu machine, but it's kinda small, so I have the library pointing to an internal 2Gb HDD. It runs RDR2 flawlessly.
For real, I only talk by experience and with old hardware, but my hacked Switch V1 runs everything, even its OS purely from the SD and I feel it runs just the same as with stock storage.
I have tried the same on my hacked switch v1. I was running Overcooked 2 from the sd card and got a little frustrated with the load times so I tries moving in to internal storage. Noticed no improvement in load speed at all. But I don't know the speed of my SD card or the speed of the switch, it might as well be the same.
Are you using the real internal storage or emulated? Emulated internal storage is still on the SD card.
Not manufacturers, experience. I remember gaming on HDDs, it was bad. SSDs were a breath of fresh air. The SD cards I own are so much worse than the HDDs that I own, so I'm very skeptical that they are fast enough.
Do you mind sharing the games your playing? And the texture resolution settings?
You remember an era before streaming assets and preloading optimization lol. Also HDD are terrible at random IO amd transactional latency. Sequential read isn't the issue never was it was random IO and seek latency. You had to wait for the HDD to even get to the data in the first place to even start reading it. much like an SSD, SD cards don't suffer from that transactional latency.
Anyway the "larger" games I've played is probably cyberpunk, DRG, and i guess overwatch? I'm not exactly a huge AAA person I like a lot of indie titles. Vein is probably the most recent game on my list since its early access. A lot of historical games would be factorio, satisfactory, Dyson Sphere program, rimworld, valheim, endless dungeon, Risk of rain 2, things like that.
Settings are usually whatever max i can maintain near 60 with. First sacrifice is always shadows and extra lighting before textures
Maybe you have better SD cards, but mine are just terrible (150MB/s on the label, but real world reads are 20MB/s, random IO also seems trash but I dont have any numbers for that), so I have a tough time believing that their sufficient, even with streaming IO. Next time I get a chance I'll install a game on it and give it a whirl, but I'm pretty pessimistic.
Keep in mind that on Windows this is pretty much guaranteed to fail because Windows is trash at dealing with IO. A hilarious fact if you install Windows on a virtual machine running under a Linux host it will get better IO benchmarks than if you were to install Windows on that machine bare metal.
It's also constantly thrashing the system with a bunch of b******* background IO so a big part of why this can work is that steamos is using Linux lol
I also run a lot of games off an SD card in my deck. Dragon age veilguard is probably the most demanding I've played off an SD card it didn't have issues.
I know whenever I purchase an SD card for the deck or something demanding I do a decent bit of research. There are a bunch of different terms/specs on SD cards that impact performance, more than just 150 MB/s. Perhaps the SD card you have isn't the best for gaming, or maybe it's a dud card or a crappy manufacturer.
Streaming assets is precisely the reason for fast i/o. There's a reason technologies like DirectStorage and its PS5 equivalent exist.
UHS II micro SD cards operate at 312MB/s
That's pretty good.. It's like double a typical HDD read speed
Read or write? I can hit the write sticker speed on mine, but read is terrible.
If read is terrible it might be due to having atime writes turned on, or just a bad card. Usually read is better than write. What filesystem?
Fat32, its a card for a camera
Definitely want to make sure atime is turned off on computers for that if possible
It'll be fine for most games you'd want to run on lower power stuff like the Frame/Deck.
I mean its practically identical, if a little slower, compared to ssd for load times on the steamdeck, even for very large games. Idk what fanciness valve pulled but it works.
Yeah, they worked well enough in the Switch (with some slowness in some games), but not for 50+GB games.