Upgrade SSD or getting a big SD card?

The only games I would feel like I’d want to have better performance from an SD card are basically just anything that runs on Unreal 5.

I was having issues with TW3 (mainly when it was raining), but I have just found out I need to actually go back to some beta version of the game instead.

Nah, performance diff is there, for sure. It depends on your use case.

I've also got both, a 1 TB SSD and 512 MB uSD.

It’s really just a cost thing.

200 bucks for a 1 TB SSD or 170 for a 1 TB SD card.

Yeah for sure, any 2D games or smaller games usually get installed to my microSD. But I usually don't want to install anything larger than a couple GB to the microSD just because it takes forever to install and update.

I should also mention that some larger games (ie Cyberpunk) specifically have slow storage settings, that will try to compensate for using slower storage like a microSD. It won't help with install/update times or general load times, but it will help some of the gameplay issues you can run into while playing.

20 bucks is cheaper enough that I might do it. Setting back up all my emulation and tweaks again seems less fun than the first time.

On Windows, Macrium Reflect is really good for disk cloning. They used to have a free version, but not anymore. Instead, you can use the 30-day trial and get all the features. They specifically support cloning Linux drives intelligently. It doesn't just go sector by sector, but that's always a fallback for things like LVM (Linux Volume Manager), which it does not natively support.

https://www.macrium.com/blog/cloning-and-imaging-linux-file-systems-39bffeaf6307

External enclosures for NVMe drives are pretty cheap to help with the cloning. Now that I use Linux on my laptop, I simply took my Windows NVMe out of my computer and stuck it in an enclosure and it still boots off USB. That's pretty handy. I bought a UGREEN brand one.

If you can swing it, Sabrent makes some nvme enclosures for the 2230 size the deck uses https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-ne30 that are super reasonable price wise, https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-snveis for full size and is also super reasonable. What I did for mine and my partner's decks upgrading from a 512 GB ssd, if you have drive space you could do with one enclosure. I use the old ssd as a removable drive now so it doesn't got to waste.

Ssd is the way to go for sure, SD card is nice to have but it's very noticeably slower for some things, I tend to use it for emulators and games I don't play frequently.

Related: Medicat/Ventoy changed my computing life. Everyone should have one, they’re insanely easy to set up and the software is all freeeee!

I'd say it kinda depends on what kind of game you play on your deck. I play a lot of smallish indie games and moat of them are on the SD card. I keep the ssd for when I want to play bigger games.

Thanks for all the detail. My daily driver is currently a windows machine, but I have looked into swapping to a Linux system.

I will keep this in mind and will very likely just get a new SSD. I have noticed some longer load times.

Due to budgeting, I will like just reinstall and use the SteamOS recovery key. Only downside is setting up EmuDeck, Lutris, and Decky again.

Ah! It’s even more visible there than on their page, leave it to me to find the hardest way lol

Also, while during gameplay it’s true that depending on the game there’s no real difference with a ssd, the speed is a matter of standard: you aren’t going to fall for a usb 2 drive boasting 1gb of speeds! But the UHS-I standard is far less known and they can make their out of standard reader, so while in practice it’s nonsense, it’s also _technically_ correct and that’s probably the one thing keeping things from being false advertising.

(My point was that it’s important to make informed purchases, get whatever has the best price/performance for your use while being aware of that kind of marketing shenanigans)

Could be. I just copy/pasted.

!Could be. I just copy/pasted.

Point still stands. I don't see any difference playing from either storage.

FYI it’s 104, not 150. https://www.sandisk.com/products/memory-cards/microsd-cards/sandisk-ultra-uhs-i-microsd?sku=SDSQUNC-016G-AN6MA At the bottom: “engineered with proprietary technology to reach speeds beyond UHS-I 104MB/s, require compatible devices capable of reaching such speed.” or in other words, it does that only with their own reader.

I would highly recommend upgrading the SSD. There is a major difference in download/install speed, update speed, and a notable improvement in loading times. Some newer games will struggle to run on a microSD at all, because they load assets in real time and the read speed is too slow.

I typically install small and older games to my microSD, but for anything modern or larger than a few GB I stick to my SSD.

For cloning mine when I upgraded, I actually just removed the old SSD from my deck, plugged it and the new SSD into my computer (didn't bother with screwing them down), and cloned them there. My main PC is linux, so it could clone the ext4/btrfs formatted drive without any additional software. If you do this with a windows PC you'll probably need special software. Another issue you can run into (especially with windows based cloning tools) is that many of them will clone the partitions exactly, meaning your new drive (despite being larger) only has partitions sized the same size as the original drive. On linux you can clone the partitions and then expand the partition to the full drive size, but I don't know if this can be done with the compatible windows clone tools.

Your best bet (if your main PC is windows) is probably to make a linux bootable drive (can be any linux distro with live boot and gparted/kparted, but Rescuezilla and Clonezilla are made specifically for this kind of thing) and boot the PC from that. That will give you full access to the linux tools for easily cloning and resizing the drive.

Alternatively, you may also just want to install the new SSD in the Deck, and reinstall steamOS using a steamOS recovery drive. It won't transfer over your files, but all your steam games/cloud saves should be easy to redownload. This is probably the easiest option.

I don't notice any difference from ssd or from sd card. I have SanDisk Ultra, 512 GB, 150 Mb/s

You want to upgrade the SSD.

I upgraded to a 2tb Corsair SSD (remember when you could just buy stuff? For reasonable money?). When I copied stuff over, I started out with the Corsair in an external enclosure. The card crashed during the copy, and I think the reason why is that these cards are dramless. They borrow ram from the host, and when you're in an enclosure the "host" has no ram to give. What I had to do was put the new card in the deck, install a steamos recovery on it, put the old card in a reader, and copy in from there.

Uhh I'll leave the details of copying to everyone else, but just know that writing to an external nvme enclosure can give you a bad time.

Clonezilla should suffice for cloning the SSD.

A docking station (like this) with included m.2 slot for the Steam Deck should do the trick to have both SSDs attached to the Steam Deck - if you plan on having a docking station for your Steam Deck anyway, that is.

Without such a docking station you need an adapter (or even two) for the SSD(s).

Easiest way would be to swap the SSDs and install SteamOS anew.

I upgraded mine with a Corsair MP600 Mini 2 TB back when that didn't cost an arm and a leg.

Per GB SD cards aren't a lot cheaper, but typically are slower and have worse durability than SSDs.

I do have an SD card in my Steam Deck, but only use it for my gog.com library. It makes moving that library between my Steam Deck and my laptop easy. On that SD card are only smallish games.

I wouldn't want to run Cyberpunk 2077 from an SD card.

I had the 64GB model, and I upgraded it to a 1TB SSD.

It is miles better; mostly because some things don't get installed in the microSD card (shader cache, proton versions...), so I barely had any space left in the internal storage, even though I had 512GB on the SD card.

I didn't clone the previous install, I just did a new install from scratch, but it was painless and very fast with a USB-C pendrive by following the official instructions. I had to redownload some games but it wasn't an issue with gigabit internet.

The performance is similar for most games if you have a quality SD card, but if a game does heavy loading you may notice a difference.

I got a deck with the small ssd and swapped it with a larger. I did not clone the drive, I installed the os via uSD. Other than that I have never used a uSD card in my deck.

A lot of people here saying to upgrade the SSD but I don't know. I got a shit ton more storage for the same price by going with SD cards, and I'm able to easily play games like Helldivers, GTA, big giant games that supposedly "Need" an ssd and I've not noticed any difference at all.

I run the 1tb SSD, a 1tb microsd and a 2tb USB-C SSD.

The internal SSD is all the normal Steam Deck stuff, the microsd is all emulation, and the external 2tb is a Windows 11 boot drive.

I actually did both but if you had to choose one it is without a doubt the SSD. And it actually is quite easy to do, just take your time.

I stuck a 2TB SanDisk Extreme microSD card in my 512GB launch day Deck and haven't noticed much in the way of performance, but I'm not playing Crimson Desert on the thing.

Anything remotely modern lives on the SSD. The rest, along with roughly 4000 ROMS, is sitting comfortably on the microSD card. Works for me!