Useful information about SD cards.

  • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    The Steam Deck is spec’ed with a UHS-1/SDHC slot, which means that you can’t use SDUC-class cards and you won’t get much benefit from using comparable cards with a UHS-II/UHS-III bus mark compared to one with a UHS-I mark, even if the other marks otherwise suggest better performance. You can basically ignore the A/V markings because they’re not granular enough to help with comparing cards at this particular performance level (you should instead compare “Random Read”/“Random Write” performance benchmark scores).

    Note that there remains a considerable amount of variance among similarly marked cards. For example, the Sandisk Extreme Pro (Bus: UHS-I, Speed: 3) can benchmark write speeds which are almost twice as fast as the Sandisk Extreme (Bus: UHS-I, Speed: 3).

    tl;dr: The ideal card will have the following markings:

    • Capacity Standard: SDXC (SDUC is not compatible)
    • UHS Bus Speed: I (higher is fine, but not helpful)
    • Speed Class: 3 (though you should really be comparing benchmark scores instead!)