Could anyone please suggest a good micro SD card that is reasonably priced and is great for the steam deck? You go to Amazon and you find a gazillion brand with many different prices. Plus all the horror stories I’ve seen online with all the fake storage people buy from Amazon. So, if you guys have a suggestion I’d really appreciate some links/names. I’m open for best buy and micro center and even Walmart if I needed to. I’m looking for a 1TB card and I don’t care about the brand as long as it works well. Thank you all in advance.
Honestly, I’ve always gone to a retail store if quality is a concern. Name brand SanDisks have literally never failed me. Just make sure you get at least U3/A2 class for speed.
This might help with understanding the labels on them: https://www.integralmemory.com/articles/memory-cards-understanding-the-labels/
So, the SD Association is absolutely fucking insane when it comes to giving labels to literally anything.
The Steam Deck supports UHS-1 microSD cards.
That’s the name of the bus. There’salso UHS-2 and UHS-3, but they’re backwards compatible with UHS-1, so that’s whatever.Speeds…
Some cards used speed “classes”, like Class 10…
There’s also U1 or U3 speeds (which is a speed rating independent of the bus. (A U3 cards is probably a UHS-1 card.
Some have a speed rated with a V, like V10, V30, etc.
They often have multiple labels too.
These can all be used to label the speed of a UHS-1 card:
UHS Speed Class- U1: 10 MB/s minimum write speed.
- U3: 30 MB/s minimum write speed.
Video Speed Class
- V6: 6 MB/s minimum write speed.
- V10: 10 MB/s minimum write speed.
- V30: 30 MB/s minimum write speed.
- V60: 60 MB/s minimum write speed.
- V90: 90 MB/s minimum write speed.
Class 10
- Class 10: 10 MB/s minimum write speed (legacy).
Anyway, U3 is basically the same as a V30.
U3/V30 would be the minimum I’d get for the Deck. Price being the deciding factor for the rest.
I don’t really care if the card ever fails, so brand was (mostly) irrelevant in my choice.deleted by creator
So, A1/A2 is yet another scale they invented because, why not.
A2 is supposed to have more IOPS than A1, although in benchmarks, some A1s perform better.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it tbh.deleted by creator
Unrelated to the question, but I just wanted to note how surprising it was how fricking HOT sd cards get after you push a couple hundred GB of data onto them
for the cards…
sandisk extreme ($139 at bby) is a good choice. the switch-licensed card is the same price, and i think it’s the same card inside. the switch one also has a discount for bbyplus members (look on bby site for that).
the samsung pro plus costs a bit less and works well, too ($89 at bby).
for where to get them, safely…
buy in-store (or online for immediate pickup) from a major (b&m) retailer to avoid the potential problems with amazon’s co-mingled inventory.
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The best place to buy Samsung cards is from Samsung’s site, the best place to buy Sandisk cards is from … Western Digital. Sometimes they even have sales that approximate Amazon.
It’s pretty safe to assume that you will get a real card from the horse’s mouth.
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I’ve had no issues with genuine SanDisk micro sdxcs despite purchasing from several different sources. SanDisk currently has a 1.5tb micro sdxc for $99 on amazon. Wherever you purchase from use f3probe to verify the card - https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html.
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