Steam Deck 1TB SSD vs Micro SD Card - Speed, Loading Times & Performance

The other nice thing about upgrading your SSD... you can still have an SD card. Meaning you can have up to about 3.5TB of storage (2TB SSD, 1.5 TB SD) in theory. Admittedly that's probably more than most people need, but with games hitting 100GB+ regularly, it's not that far-fetched to think that we might want more than the 1-1.5TB available from an SD Card. Especially if emulating, I have nearly 500GB of ROMs alone! And it's nice to be able to just copy all 500GB over from my Retroid Pocket 3+ rather than having to curate the library on my Steam Deck to save space

is there a limit to the speed of steam deck nvme ssd? I want to swap mine but I am not sure which nvme 2230 ssd to get whether it is worth it to spend premium on the maximum ssd performance possible. It would be useless if the steam deck did not utilise that.

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damn... that's a no for me. i need the extra speed. thanks god i already bought the 1tb one. the guy was really nice putting a dock too!!. but yeah... microsd's are no where close to ssds thanks for the heads up man :). might have to say goodbye to steamos for now.. it's great for gaming! but... i need all my apps. there's a limit of what i can do with wine. i will miss tho until the 2tb ssd. so i can use both

Another thing to mention having a larger main drive can solve many headaches with mods why some games needs special programs like fallout i fucking struggle i just give up and now im updationg my 64 gb hdd and yes you can use your steam deck to make the bootable device if you dont know like i did which etcher steam on their official recoment that one to mention this program runs with windows for those who dont got a pc for rufus or the creation tool from microsoft dont know which other games may be requirre to be on the main drive but it can help i dont think if nesesary the upgrade if you dont care for mods games run well and ondt take that much after all.

How much more responsive the operating system is now after upgrading was worth it alone.

sd card for light game and ssd for heavy game

pry open the deck from the l2 r2 triggers, it just pops right open!!!

decky works on pc with the build i mentioned drops mic

my gen 4 nvme cost me 75 dollars for 1tb in 2230 factor on amazon, prices have come down

if you like the steamdeck the same os on pc is actually way better, steamdeck uses a locked down noob os, you want garuda gnome with pop-shell for tiling and gamescope-session-git for steam os you can pick at login instead of gnome, enjoy a functional pc that doesnt fuck you for profit

what differnce betweensata with1 noch and 2 noches , can steamdeck support mSata with2 Noches?

microsd cards have speeds up to 150mbps depending on the card same as a hdd speed, ssd depending on what you get you can go from 500mbp up to 7gbps speeds now

try compare them with direct storage ~

divide and conquer use ssd for big 3A tittles and use sd for emulation

aint got these issues with my 1tb sd card, is it maybe the brand, i am using the best SanDisk extreme so that might be part of it, my steam deck is only 2 days old though so i haven't had much experience with it yet, though i do love that 512 gigs of space, i have a 2tb ssd coming, love when amazon has its prime day cause others do to :D

Remember it depends on the age of the game..games from early 2015 for example wont really have any noticeable difference..its not until you get to GTA 5, the witcher 3, fallout 4 etc..even then many games after that time only load 20 to 25% slower..it really does depend.

I love my steam deck but I think valve needs to rethink the ram options on the base to top tier models. Would have been hard, but I would have been fine with an extra 5mm thickness in order to eek out 20gb vs 16 gbcould have used the extra ram as dedicated video ram adding extra value and performance. But I use mine as a daily driver and am considering my next PC build will be Linux based w/ windows dual boot

Apart from NMS I find the general loading times tested here rather short and therefore the difference not big of a deal. I can wait five seconds longer on CP or GTA or other games that have loading times similiar to that. But damn, the NMS difference is night and day. I wonder how other games with rather long loading times (similiar to the one of NMS) compare.

I think I'll get the SSD. Thank you for the video

Any games that are 10+ years old I think would be fine on a SD card since they were basically designed for an HDD.

The receptacle for the sd card needs to be able to read the card at the higher rated speed in order to get the printed speed.

No shit sherlock

Thanks, wish someone did this when the Deck came out. There was a misconception that there was only a minor difference in load times

This video rocks.

Here i was thinking i was missing out cause i bought the 65gb but honestly its suppeior in every way better brightness/colors same internals and power besides storage like i dont know why anyone choses to spend hundreds more for what a a lil bit of storage and worst screen?

So basically an " HDD " like experience from an Micro SD, well i don't mind the wait, i have an asus rog zephyrus g14, paired with a 4TB HDD and Everything works and runs amazing, things just take a bit longer to load, definitely not a deal-breaker

I'm poor tho

Darn valve lied to us when they said near identical performance on the sd card. Sad

Thanks for the video!

Did you notice that your battery life shortened due to increase in SSD consumption? I want to install a BG4 too, but temps and battery are my concerns.

Great video❤

i got a wd purple qd101 512gb sd card for one reason;
write endurance, it can have 256 TBW before it commits die (or atleast it was advertised as such)
and i know sd cards had a bad habit of dying randomly due to writing (iv had 3 die due to being used in a raspberry pi)
and that is why i chose it

I have the 64gb gig, with a 512gb SD card. I'm looking to upgrade my ssd. My dilemma is whether I should go with the 512 or the 1tb. The 2230 WD SN740 is 50$ for 512, and 80$ for the 1tb, on Aliexpress. I'm not a game hoarder. I usually play a couple of games at a time, and once I'm done with them, I don't usually keep them. I might sideload windows to add my gamepass natively, and play some of the unsupported games. If I get the 512 ssd, I can use that difference in price towards a case or a dock. Is it worth it getting the 1tb? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks

I have both as well. My understanding is the micro sd card maxed out at 100mbs reads regardless of card speed. At least the games run from the micro sd i suppose. I conclude bigger more intensive games should run from the internal. Less intensive games can be ran from the micro sd.

So you want graphics heavy games on the ssd and lower stuff on the sd

While this video a bit harsh on SD card it still performs better than HDD. IMO it's perfect choice for older game and ones without an open world.

If you only Show some of the largest and longest loading Games ever created then you COMPLETELY miss the point:

MicroSD Performance for the AVERAGE title is only 1-5 seconds slower. Which is completely negligible. That includes Emulation - correct you said that - but it ALSO includes 99% of the steam Games catalogue. Because 99% of Games are NOT 50-150GB behemoth AAA Games.

Honestly I’m not too surprised that the SD card maxed out at around 90MB/sec. The UHS-1 standard itself tops out at around 104MB/sec max theoretical, and most of the readers I’ve tried maxed out closer to around 80-90MB/sec real world in my testing. I’ve never gotten my hands on a Steam Deck to test its reader, but generally 90MB/sec is pretty good for an SD card.

Hopefully we will see better protocols and standards in the coming years. I’d love to see 200 or 300MB/sec become the standard, which would be game changing for things like this. Sandisk has apparently found a way to make it possible in their cards, but it requires special readers that implement special standards that aren’t present in non-Sandisk readers.

Edit: not exclusively Sandisk readers, but certain other readers implement it also. Turns out it’s not a proprietary standard, but rather UHS-2, which is open to other manufactures but just not widely adopted yet.

First game name?

ah yes sd card the hdd of steamdeck.

my question... did you just test the one sd card... because I dont have that much of a gap with the samsung evo?

Dude! you should get professional help with your Steam Deck obsession, it's just a stupid device geee.

how nerdy of you Andy to use the micro letter/symbol than writing micro in the thumbnail. 😉

What I found interesting was the temperature difference on the SD card based Steam Deck ….. up to 10c warmer under sone benchmarks 🥵🫠🧐

Great video, very informative!
While I had assumed there would be a real performance difference, it's even bigger than I thought it would be. I've got a 256GB Deck with a 512GD SD, bit am starting to consider now also upgrading the internal SSD.

Cool video, thanks for making this. You got me wondering if there's a significant difference with higher-end emulation, which I've noticed tends to be pretty sensitive to shader caching and stutter. IE Breath of the Wild on Cemu. I don't care about slower loads as much, but reducing shader stutter on Switch/Wii might actually be worth trying to figure out how to move it over without breaking everything lol.