Choosing the Best SD Card for your Steam Deck

I am aware I am saying Megabit instead of Megabyte... apologies it's all in Megabytes per second MB/s not Mbit/S. Apologies for the error I just wasn't paying attention to what I said.

0:00 – Intro
0:56 – What’s being tested
2:06 – Patterns from testing
2:45 – Load Time Benchmarks
4:24 – Endurance?
6:26 – Is there a best SD Card?
7:18 – Outro

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Choosing the Best SD Card for your Steam Deck

Robeytech

[RobeytechLive]

I am aware I was throwing out Megabits and Megabytes all willie nillie. Apologies. It's all Megabytes and I have since sacked myself for the terrible oversite. I had to rehire myself, because we still need to make videos. Forgive me!

[mic]

Thank you SO much! I just bought the standard Kingston for my steam deck and you have dispelled the slightest doubt I had. Thank you again for this video ❤

[rohitsumant]

This will be helpful. Now I don't have to actually spend on the high speeds but instead could spend on increasing the size of the cards! Thanks for the super helpful video!!

[christiangarcia]

Getting my dream Deck hopefully next. Thank for the very informative video guys.

[DeusMachina]

The read speed is usually similar on all these cards due to Steam deck limitations however I can tell you the cheaper cards don't have good sustained write speeds. I totally saw a noticeable difference using different cards particularly on the game install.

[Juice]

Thanks bro! You just saved me a hundred bucks 😆
I just got my Steam Deck today and ripped out the 1tb card I had in my Switch. I was kinda worried that I’d be missing out on performance because it’s a year or two old and caps at 120mb but it sounds like it’ll do the same job a newer card would anyway 👍🏽

[JR]

This is a fantastic video, and am so glad you not only covered a diverse set of microSD cards but also drove home as to what specifically to look out for and which features will be utilized and which won't

For my use case, I'll be going for a 1 TB SanDisk or at least the 512 GB Samsung microSD card after also getting the $649 512 GB Steam Deck as well since I play a lot of different games most of the time

[jamesferguson]

This was such a good video and very specific. I think the only questions I have are about the random read/write performance and how much the write performance differs. I am planning on using my steam deck to transfer games to my PC. Now I have a starting point though. Great video.

[himuradrew]

Surpsied you guys didn't test big open world games like Cyberpunk, Witcher and Elden Ring

[unstopology]

I've had several Samsung cards fail on me in just a few months. I don't remember a SanDisk card ever failing on me whether it was in my phone, dslr or other device. That's just my experience.

That's too bad that the speed is capped on the Deck.

[gilbertplays]

I just bought a SanDisk 512gb extreme pro SD card for $65 in the Philippines. Easily one of the best buys I made in 2023.

[TalonJHGaming]

This is helpful for sure. Hopefully my SD comes in soon.

[maxworldcanada]

This video came in clutch, because I soon realized that games take a whole lot of space on the deck... specially AAA titles... I only have a handful and it's full already... serves me right for buying the 64gb version lol

[YAYAYOYOY]

That's a really nice looking thumbnail

[ramthx]

would have love a test on the difference on writing to the sd cards been told buy a2 not a1 if suing a steam deck?

[MyNameIsBucket]

Just about any SD made today will hit the Deck limitations. The only things you have to watch out for (which I got burned on) are refurb brands. I bought Newegg's brand and it was hacked to report the wrong capacity. My Deck just refused to format it.

On a side note, I really hope Valve eases up on the filesystem requirements. The filesystem they use is just plain unreadable in other machines, and the Deck simply won't mount cards in any other filesystem unless you do it manually in desktop mode. This utterly defeats the purpose of removable storage.

[miguelrojas]

I tent to buy Sandisk Only. But it’s good to know how others compare.

[carlos]

the results you got were pretty much what i was seeing from other videos, so when i got my steam deck i got a 512gb silicon power card for $40. same one i got for my switch (but 128gb) about 6 months ago. both cards have been doing fine.

with the cloud saves and having all the os files on the main drive, i really don't see an issue with using cheap storage for gaming intalls. same on my pc, i got the cheapest 512gb ssd about 2 years ago as a game drive.

[BJALT]

ty for the video, answered all my questions.

[blueamcat]

Knowing that the Deck has a cap on card speed is definitely a huge advantage!