SD card as reliable secondary storage?

[itzflame002]

hello all, long time lurker here
my laptop is a lenovo thinkpad flex 5 (FLEX 5-15ARE05) that is great for what i use it for (web browsing and school) because of the touch screen and lightweight but it has one major flaw, the SSD is only 120 GBs of storage. failing to find any good resources for disassembly i won't be taking the time to replace the SSD (plus the hassle of a fresh windows install).

           it has a regular (not micro) SD card slot, if i get a go out and purchase a reputable brand name one that has fast-ish W/R speeds. will it be acceptable or laggy? 
i dont want to boot off of it just for storage of pdf files and likes.
thanks in advance. 

[BoomerDutch]

Not reliable for OS.

It will be slow and possibly not gonna work.

 

It only works best for SD card if its installed near CPU with steam deck does.

 

Sd card is only useful for transfer files

On laptops.

 

You can certainly try install games on it.

Load times will be long or it will crash

 

You can buy external SSD and if you have usb 3 (blue usb) then yes with external SSD can work.

[Needfuldoer]

I consider SD cards to be disposable storage devices, like USB flash drives. They're okay, but less trustworthy than "real" SSDs or hard drives.

 

It's going to be slower than your boot SSD, so I wouldn't run software off of it, but it's perfectly adequate as file storage.

 

No matter where you store your data, always follow the 3-2-1 backup rule for stuff you care about: have three copies, on two different kinds of media, one of which is off-site. (Cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive counts as off-site.)

[King Minor]

11 minutes ago, itzflame002 said:

hello all, long time lurker here
my laptop is a lenovo thinkpad flex 5 (FLEX 5-15ARE05) that is great for what i use it for (web browsing and school) because of the touch screen and lightweight but it has one major flow, the SSD is only 120 GBs of storage. failing to find any good resources for disassembly i won't be taking the time to replace the SSD (plus the hassle of a fresh windows install).

           it has a regular (not micro) SD card slot, if i get a go out and purchase a reputable brand name one that has fast-ish W/R speeds. will it be acceptable or laggy? 
i dont want to boot off of it just for storage of pdf files and likes.
thanks in advance. 

May I note as said by Linus in This Video. Hard drives and ssds usually give you errors months of weeks before they fail, You won't have that luxury with an sd card.

While it should be fine, be careful using it as a primary storage device.

[Blazepoint5]

33 minutes ago, itzflame002 said:

hello all, long time lurker here
my laptop is a lenovo thinkpad flex 5 (FLEX 5-15ARE05) that is great for what i use it for (web browsing and school) because of the touch screen and lightweight but it has one major flow, the SSD is only 120 GBs of storage. failing to find any good resources for disassembly i won't be taking the time to replace the SSD (plus the hassle of a fresh windows install).

           it has a regular (not micro) SD card slot, if i get a go out and purchase a reputable brand name one that has fast-ish W/R speeds. will it be acceptable or laggy? 
i dont want to boot off of it just for storage of pdf files and likes.
thanks in advance. 

Since you said its for storing pdf then thats good but they are not reliable, then can get lost easily, some easily get corrupted and thus would make you loss your stuff.

 

It is recommended to get a portable ssd since they are not small as sd cards and gets easily lost plus they are faster and has less rist of corruption.

 

You can get a flash drive too its better than sd card or regular 2.5" portable hdd if you cant get the ssd.

[NobleGamer]

2 hours ago, BoomerDutch said:

Not reliable for OS.

It will be slow and possibly not gonna work.

OP said they are not using it as OS:

 

2 hours ago, itzflame002 said:

i dont want to boot off of it just for storage of pdf files and likes.

That's fine for reading docs especially if you back them up elsewhere or you don't mind losing the files eventually, because they're not as reliable as external drives. SD reliability is measured in hours (connected or actually in use? Who knows), not TBW or drive writes per day like drives.

 

I haven't had a SD card fail on me in spite of using the same one in a phone for years, but they dont have diagnostic warnings & tools (e.g. SMART tests & stats) like external drives do. Some USB storage sticks might support these, but I haven't seen evidence that they're more reliable than SD cards.

 

You can get an SD card with at least a Class 10/U1 speed, and if the SD card doesn't even have it on the card I won't even think of buying it because the random & small file read/write speeds would likely be much worse.

 

As for my personal experience with SD card for my PC: I bought an Sandisk U1 400 GB micro SD and decided to try to use it for storing 100+ smaller GB games. No loading/performance complaints. So it works well for games but when I kept it plugged in often, Steam would seem to regularly revalidate or update a handful of games after each startup, which indicates to me an occasional corruption issue or maybe a bug with Steam library handling SD cards. So I only plug it in when there's a small game I want to play.

[kokosnh]

SD card are not reliable storage solution, it’s one of the reasons phone manufacturers stopped including them as hybrid sim slots.
They are usually on crappy nand, and have no build in protection for wear leveling, or error correction, and they also do not refresh data. 

I only buy hi end fast reputable SD cards, and I had failures, as well, as data retention problems ( I had corrupted old photos on the SD card , not all, just random old ones, what’s worse, I rewritten my backup with the corrupted ones ).

 

use it as pendrive, only to move a copy odpad the data somewhere, it’s not a good secondary storage media.