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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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Is an SD card going to have the same performance (and longevity?) as an SSD? Back when I was using a Raspberry Pi people always said it was kinda risky running the OS on an SD card.
You'd still be running the OS on the SSD (the smaller one is 256GB, that's still plenty of space). As for whether SD Cards are worse, I have no idea :0 I know I'm running most of my Switch games off an SD Card and never noticed any performance issues, but Switch games really aren't demanding enough to be a good benchmark I guess
On a Steam Deck, it is noticeable. Some blame the SD reader itself, which might not give the best speeds, but there's a noticeable difference between a very expensive very fast SD, and the still faster internal storage. Load times on heavy games groom the SD can be... Long.
Oh, interesting! Is it just the initial load times, or is there noticeable lag? Because the former might be fine, but the latter would be a total motion sickness nightmare in VR
I mean, I'm talking on my experience on the Steam Deck, but I think it still might apply. Load times are slower in general. I reckon if a game streams assets on the fly heavily (a GTA-like game, a heavy open world game), that might put it to the test. But I haven't had cases where it just struggles to keep the game flow because of storage streaming speed. It's just...you feel it installing and handling big file chunks is a slower process in general.
Theoretically, an SSD has the potential to perform better. I got the 512gb steam deck+a 1tb SD card and for a while I was very careful about putting all the most demanding games on the SSD and everything else on the SD card. But once I started running out of space on the internal drive I just switched to putting everything on the SD card and I really haven't noticed any performance difference. The only thing is maybe initial load times are slightly longer. But once everything is loaded and cached it runs basically the same from what I can tell.