this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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Maybe you have better SD cards, but mine are just terrible (150MB/s on the label, but real world reads are 20MB/s, random IO also seems trash but I dont have any numbers for that), so I have a tough time believing that their sufficient, even with streaming IO. Next time I get a chance I'll install a game on it and give it a whirl, but I'm pretty pessimistic.
I also run a lot of games off an SD card in my deck. Dragon age veilguard is probably the most demanding I've played off an SD card it didn't have issues.
I know whenever I purchase an SD card for the deck or something demanding I do a decent bit of research. There are a bunch of different terms/specs on SD cards that impact performance, more than just 150 MB/s. Perhaps the SD card you have isn't the best for gaming, or maybe it's a dud card or a crappy manufacturer.
Keep in mind that on Windows this is pretty much guaranteed to fail because Windows is trash at dealing with IO. A hilarious fact if you install Windows on a virtual machine running under a Linux host it will get better IO benchmarks than if you were to install Windows on that machine bare metal.
It's also constantly thrashing the system with a bunch of b******* background IO so a big part of why this can work is that steamos is using Linux lol
Well, you are correct, they are more than adequate. I updated my original comment with my findings, but just wanted to say thanks for informing me. I'll still keep using SSDs personally, because I have lost a few SD cards to corruption over the years, but I can see the appeal of moving between systems easily.