High Speed SD Cards

Brick1026 · July 15, 2021

I'm considering buying a Steam Deck when reservations go live but I'm hesitant because I'm not really interested in shelling out an extra $129 for the NVME SSD version. Its noted on the Steam Deck page that the Steam Deck will have a highspeed Micro SD card reader. Is it practical to buy the $400 model and get a high capacity Micro SD card to play games on? And if so, how does one look for Micro SD cards that are capable of running potentially AAA games with reasonable load times? I want to help finding a good SD card for maybe $60-$70 or get some advice on how I can narrow my search for a good SD card considering SD card speeds are not an area I am very well informed and I don't know what is considered fast enough for this purpose. Thanks in advance!

LWM723 · July 15, 2021

SD cards fail all too frequently. Spend a little more for the SSD, much faster.

Kilrah · July 15, 2021

A large, fast card will cost you almost as much as the upgrade and still be much worse.

Chris Pratt · July 15, 2021

The absolute fastest MicroSDs are UHS-II with 300MB/s speeds, and will cost you around $150 for 128GB, which still leaves you 64GB shy of the total storage you'd have with the midrange Steam Deck with NVMe, which is also going to be orders of magnitude faster.

The $400 model is a bad deal all around, and really shouldn't even exist. I'd imagine it's only offered at all, because someone in the marketing department thought they needed a version under $500. You really shouldn't even consider anything less than the $529 model, as what you lose by going lower is far more than $129 in value.