With Steam Deck finally becoming more widely available, it’s a great time to take a look at storage expansion options for the laptop. After all, even the bulkiest 512GB Steam Deck won’t be enough as you delve into your library, especially as more and more games are certified for Steam Deck. That’s why we’ve rounded up the best Micro SD cards for Steam Deck, focusing on high-performance cards to ensure fast load times.
As you’d expect from a handheld that brings portable PC gaming at a lower price, Valve opted for the more common UHS-1 standard rather than the faster but more expensive UHS-2. This means you don’t have to spend a lot to get a fast memory card, but it does mean that Valve had to perform some minor magic tricks to make games loaded on the Micro SD card load as fast as those on the internal card. storage.
This brings us to the recommendations. We focused our efforts on cards between 128GB and 1TB in size, as they currently offer the best value per gigabyte (which we calculated for each choice).
We also looked at each card’s “Application Performance Class”, which indicates an increasing level of shuffle performance, essential for reducing game load times. A1 requires a minimum shuffle of 1,500 IOPS, while A2 requires more than double: 4,000 IOPS. Finally, we listed the maximum sequential read speed for each card, another performance indicator.
Best Steam Deck UK Micro SD Cards
In the UK you will find that the 512GB cards are the best value compared to everything else on the market. While we would personally recommend going as far as possible, with the Steam Deck having the functionality to move things around like a console (I guess that’s the whole point of the device, right?), it could be more advantageous to buy a pair of 512 GB micro SD cards and when you go on a trip, exchange them when you need a particular game.
Best Steam Deck US Micro SD Cards
US retailers have a wider range of Micro SD cards than their UK counterparts, so our recommendations here are slightly different. While some choices like the 1TB Lexar Play Card seem like a universal bargain, Silicon Power’s options are great for smaller sizes in the US. However, we suggest considering 256GB or more as you see a similar value per gigabyte and more games will fit on the drive – there’s nothing worse than having 128GB free and realizing that your game requires 130GB. Still, 128GB is more than enough for older or indie titles, so pick the size that’s right for you.
How to Move Games to SD Card on Steam Deck
So once you’ve chosen a micro SD card for your Steam Deck, how do you move things around? It’s really easy, with just a few menus to navigate.
Press the Steam button and bring up the slide-out menu, then choose settings. From there, scroll down the settings menu until you come to the storage option. In this menu, you can press the Y button to start 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, your games installed on that card disappear from Steam – and when you reinsert it, the games reappear. This unlocks the door to having different cards with different decks; you can easily load one card with your favorite multiplayer titles, and the other with single player games for example. Of course, going for a higher capacity card means no swapping and a simpler overall solution.
We plan to run benchmarks on these cards in the near future, but our experience running game load tests on PC and Switch should hold us in good stead in the meantime.
Have questions about Micro SD cards on Steam Deck that we haven’t covered here? Let us know in the comments below, or talk to @wsjudd on Twitter.
