It's so nice that SOMEONE is trying to make good use of great technology and isn't actively trying to engineer microSD cards out of existence.
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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This gives me tremendous hope for more x86 game emulation on Android devices, because Valve have been throwing resources behind the development of FEX for emulation on ARM for the Frame.
I am absolutely convinced that my existing phone and retro gaming handheld have enough horsepower for 3D games from 6 years ago once this compatibility layers are built out a bit.
6 years ago might be a bit ambitious, unless you are thinking of certain games that were more AA or Indie.
But yeah, having this in the ecosystem will be great in the long term, no question.
Such a delight to see people really praising Valve for doing such and obvious yet revolutionary tech development and at the same time in next post people be shitting on Gabe for buying a multi-million research vessel cause he's a fucking billionaire and there is no good billionaires.
Fun times to live!
Oh was it a research vessel? Maybe that was part of the outrage is they just assumed he was buying a yacht? Now I'm interested in what type of research it's doing.
Yacht research
The yacht owner segment of mobile gamers is small but it's part of the market nonetheless.
It's such an obvious and simple thing but it really feels revolutionary and high-tech.
~~MicroSD cards are crazy slow compared to all other storage, this doesnt seem like a good idea~~
I had a chance to test Watch Dogs Legion on my fastest SD card (Samsung, v30, 170MB/s read, 130MB/s write) and it was perfectly playable, even cranked to ultra. So I take back my assertion.
I guess my camera software must just be crazy slow, because im more used to real world 20MB/s read.
I will still assert that you need a good high speed card reader, I have seen some cheapo ones that are garbage, but given Valve has full control of that, shouldn't be a problem.
Manufacturers have wildly oversold you on how much speed you need to run a game. I use my SD card for almost all of my games on my steam deck none of them have any problems loading none of them load slowly.
Games are very good about preloading assets before they're needed
Manufacturers have wildly oversold you on how much speed you need to run a game.
For real, I only talk by experience and with old hardware, but my hacked Switch V1 runs everything, even its OS purely from the SD and I feel it runs just the same as with stock storage.
I have tried the same on my hacked switch v1. I was running Overcooked 2 from the sd card and got a little frustrated with the load times so I tries moving in to internal storage. Noticed no improvement in load speed at all. But I don't know the speed of my SD card or the speed of the switch, it might as well be the same.
Are you using the real internal storage or emulated? Emulated internal storage is still on the SD card.
Manufacturers have wildly oversold you on how much speed you need to run a game.
Microsoft is at least partly responsibile for this. Modern Windows loves to dominate your hard drive with background tasks that you didn't ask for, to the point of leaving foreground tasks starved for I/O.
I find Linux to be superior in this area, and I often run modern games from a slow mechanical hard drive with no trouble at all. It's unsurprising that your Steam Deck does just fine with an SD card.
Yeah, I have Steam installed on an SSD in my Kubuntu machine, but it's kinda small, so I have the library pointing to an internal 2Gb HDD. It runs RDR2 flawlessly.
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UHS II micro SD cards operate at 312MB/s
That's pretty good.. It's like double a typical HDD read speed
Read or write? I can hit the write sticker speed on mine, but read is terrible.
If read is terrible it might be due to having atime writes turned on, or just a bad card. Usually read is better than write. What filesystem?
Fat32, its a card for a camera
Definitely want to make sure atime is turned off on computers for that if possible
I did some test on my deck when I first got it seeing the difference in load times when a game was installed on its m.2 SSD vs a Micro SD card and the difference was there but pretty negligible. a long load time that took 16 seconds on SSD took 18 on Micro SD. It isn't something I'd personally notice unless I was timing it.
This heavily depends on the game. Which game were you testing?
In my experience at least, small Indies and last-gen or earlier ports from console are fine, but games with frequent loading times and those designed for SSDs benefit from being installed to the internal storage.
I mean its practically identical, if a little slower, compared to ssd for load times on the steamdeck, even for very large games. Idk what fanciness valve pulled but it works.
It'll be fine for most games you'd want to run on lower power stuff like the Frame/Deck.
Yeah, they worked well enough in the Switch (with some slowness in some games), but not for 50+GB games.
I don't see the use case for myself. It's too easy to install it through Wifi onto local memory and unlike a cartridge, you can have it installed in as many devices as you share your account. I also would have little overlap between the games I'd run for each platform. I'd trade it for another built-in USB-C port in a heartbeat.
This is pretty useful for people with bad internet (or data-capped, because that exists for some reason), especially with some games taking up 100+ gb
what does internet have to do with local transfers from PC to PC over wifi?
wifi does not mean internet, and you can easily share games from PC to PC over wifi or ethernet via steam.
Instead of redownloading the game twice on a steam deck and steam machine (or steam frame) you could just take the same micro SD card out and insert it into the other device and play from there
Edit: You could also copy a game's install files over to the SD card and move them directly if you really don't want to run the game directly off the SD card
Steam has long supported game transfer via local network. You just need to have both machines on the same network and turned on with one having the game installed already. When you start the download on the other device, it'll copy the files locally.
what? or just transfer from PC to PC via wifi through steam negating any SD card..
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/46BD-6BA8-B012-CE43
use PC 1 that already has it downloaded and installed, and have pc2 download from PC 1.. why worry about a 3rd hard drive or rehoming the SD card and potentially screwing the file structure up by potentially inserting Linux (steam deck) into what I can only assume would be a Windows based pc
Because if you are on a steam deck and just install it on the SD card to begin with I guarantee you it's faster to pop out the SD card and insert it into the other device than it is to copy the files over a network, especially if one of those devices is a VR headset.
Besides, more options to do the same thing isn't necessarily a bad thing. People can pick whichever they like best. If someone has games already installed on an SD card in their steam deck and want to quickly move them over to a steam machine or steam frame then this would be super convenient for them.
This is also specifically an article about the steam deck, steam frame, and steam machine so all of the devices would be using SteamOS and not Windows anyway. Not really sure why you're bringing up Windows.
I'm not surprised it works that way on between steam deck and steam deck and the architecture is identical in terms of what steam needs
It's not identical? They are different architectires.
What does the architecture of the CPU have to do with the disk format? Nothing lol, linux arm can use ext4, btrfs, xfs etc same as it's x86 counterpart
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Sure but with FEX it shouldn’t matter
Despite being ARM CPUs and Linux based machines, I'm pretty sure most of what they play is Windows x86 binaries.
What I will find fascinating is that if Linux does get a major foothold this might be the way that we actually transition off of x86 because of having all these different translation layers and then we can start creating new and interesting CPU architectures that would be more efficient than stuff that's been sitting from the 80s but still having the backwards compatibility through translation layers
Guessing the disk format used between both systems is identical too (at least from what I saw on my steam deck when using the tool integrated into SteamOS big picture)
Well the great thing about Linux is that it supports so many different file formats it doesn't really matter but yeah it's probably going to be exfat for the SD cards and ext4 for hard drive
It was ext4 for the SD card on default format on Deck (Not too sure why, maybe something to do with size limitations?)
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You can do that on any computer…
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