Useful information about SD cards.
Informative, thanks for sharing!
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Steam Deck
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Which of these markings are most important for steam deck use?
Application performance class, launching games is a rendom workload so better random performance is much more important then sequential.
Out of those, application performance class is the one you want. Even better is a real-world random read benchmark.
- The capacity standard isn’t super helpful. Everything from 64GB to 2TB is SDXC, which is supported.
- The Steam Deck only uses UHS-I. It’ll work with UHS-II and UHS-III cards, but they won’t have any meaningful benefits.
- Pretty much any decent microSD Card in 2023 is class 10. If it’s anything else, that’s a red flag.
- Higher UHS speed class and video speed class are probably better, but they’re measuring write performance. For playing games, random read performance is far more important.
Hey tech companies, why not make one single number to tell how good something is, the higher number being the better?
Different use cases (photo/film/smartphone/console) have different requirements. Just one number would not be enough.
Hey user, why not make an effort to understand the technology and its use-cases instead of demanding OEMs simplify specs and ratings down to a single number
Now what's the difference between the 3 speeds?
Thanks for this clear detail.
Are you able to advise what recommendations you would suggest for the Steam Deck.
From memory a U3 card is recommended in the size of our choice?
The Steam Deck is spec'ed with a UHS-1/SDHC slot, which means that you can't use SDUC-class cards and you won't get much benefit from using comparable cards with a UHS-II/UHS-III bus mark compared to one with a UHS-I mark, even if the other marks otherwise suggest better performance. You can basically ignore the A/V markings because they're not granular enough to help with comparing cards at this particular performance level (you should instead compare "Random Read"/"Random Write" performance benchmark scores).
Note that there remains a considerable amount of variance among similarly marked cards. For example, the Sandisk Extreme Pro (Bus: UHS-I, Speed: 3) can benchmark write speeds which are almost twice as fast as the Sandisk Extreme (Bus: UHS-I, Speed: 3).
tl;dr: The ideal card will have the following markings:
- Capacity Standard: SDXC (SDUC is not compatible)
- UHS Bus Speed: I (higher is fine, but not helpful)
- Speed Class: 3 (though you should really be comparing benchmark scores instead!)
Samsung Evo 512 is really good for the Steam Deck. Fast & reliable.
Great timing, my steam deck arrives tomorrow and I was looking at storage options. Definitely ended up with a better card
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