MicroSD cards are crazy slow compared to all other storage, this doesnt seem like a good ideaI had a chance to test Watch Dogs Legion on my fastest SD card (Samsung, v30, 170MB/s read, 130MB/s write) and it was perfectly playable, even cranked to ultra. So I take back my assertion.
I guess my camera software must just be crazy slow, because im more used to real world 20MB/s read.
I will still assert that you need a good high speed card reader, I have seen some cheapo ones that are garbage, but given Valve has full control of that, shouldn’t be a problem.
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
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.
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.
Such a delight to see people really praising Valve for doing such and obvious yet revolutionary tech development and at the same time in next post people be shitting on Gabe for buying a multi-million research vessel cause he’s a fucking billionaire and there is no good billionaires.
Fun times to live!
I don’t see the use case for myself. It’s too easy to install it through Wifi onto local memory and unlike a cartridge, you can have it installed in as many devices as you share your account. I also would have little overlap between the games I’d run for each platform. I’d trade it for another built-in USB-C port in a heartbeat.
You can do that on any computer…
My laptop doesn’t have an SD slot. Are they common?
You could use a usb sd card reader but it’s more a comment on how this is a nothing burger.
