Useful information about SD cards.

    •  Dominic   ( @Dominic@beehaw.org ) 
      5•1 year ago

      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.
    •  chaorace   ( @chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      12•1 year ago

      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!)