The games on the Steam Deck continue to improve as Valve polishes SteamOS, developers implement game fixes, and new titles are released. However, having so many good games available means that the storage space on your Deck can fill up quite quickly, and as such, picking up a cheap, high-capacity Micro SD card to expand your storage makes a lot of sense. This is especially true given the magic Valve has worked to keep game load times just as fast on Micro SD as they are on internal storage.
With that in mind, here are the best Micro SD cards for the Steam Deck, from 128GB to 1TB in size. To make these judgments, we rely on our own testing and a careful examination of each card’s specifications and price. We decided to only recommend cards rated A2 or higher, as they denote a minimal level of random read performance, which is key to reducing game load times. For reference, A1 requires a minimum random read of 1.5K IOPS, while A2 requires more than double that: 4K IOPS. Finally, we list the maximum sequential read speed for each card, another performance indicator.
Best Micro SD Cards Steam Deck UK
In the UK, you’ll find the 512GB cards to be the best value compared to everything else on the market, but the 128GB, 256GB and 1TB options also make sense, with the larger cards becoming more expensive. cheap as 2023 progresses. Samsung makes up most of the top options here, but Canvas Go! The 256GB Plus card offers significantly better speeds at a nearly identical price, making it excellent value for money.
Best Steam Deck US Micro SD Cards
American retailers carry a wider range of Micro SD cards than their UK equivalents, so our recommendations here are slightly different. In addition to Silicon Power cards, which are always a safe choice, we’ve gone with TeamGroup’s Pro Plus cards which offer extremely good value in higher capacities. 256GB and 512GB are currently sweet spots, with better value than 128GB or 1TB cards, but all four capacities are currently viable.
More essential accessories for Steam Deck
Besides an SD card and a case (which Valve kindly provides), what is the most essential accessory for the Steam Deck? If you want to use the Deck more like a desktop computer, then a dock is ideal: it turns the single USB-C port into multiple USB ports for connecting peripherals like a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, while also providing USB-C pass-through to keep the platform loaded.
While Valve’s official Deck Dock is now available at a pricey £79, I’ve been testing an alternative from iVoler that ticks all the boxes for a lower price. It costs $35/£37, significantly cheaper and has pretty much the same features as the official version. There’s HDMI 2.0 for 4K 60Hz or 1440p120Hz output, 100W power delivery, Ethernet, and three USB-A ports. (The official dock has the same ports plus a DisplayPort 1.4 connector.) The base is made of metal, holds the deck upright comfortably, and has performed flawlessly in my tests, so it’s worth considering in my opinion.
How to move games to SD card on Steam Deck
So once you’ve decided on a micro SD card for your Steam Deck, how are you going to move things around? It’s really easy, with just a couple of menus to navigate.
Press the Steam button and open the sliding menu, then choose settings. From here, scroll down the settings menu until you reach the storage option. In this menu, you can press the Y button to initiate moving the software from your internal drive to Micro SD, or vice versa. You can even press X when highlighting the two storage options to set your preferred default install location.
When you eject the Micro SD card, the games installed on that card will disappear from Steam, and when you reinsert it, the games will reappear. This opens the door to having different cards with different games; You can easily load one card with your favorite multiplayer titles and the other with single-player games, for example. Of course, opting for a higher capacity card means not having to change it and is generally a simpler solution.
We’re looking to run some performance tests on these cards in the near future, but our experience running game load tests on PC and Switch should help us in the meantime.
Do you have any questions about Micro SD cards in the Steam Deck that we haven’t covered here? Let us know in the comments below or talk to @wsjudd On twitter.
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Source: ptivs2.edu.vn