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Best SD Card for Steam Deck

Get this SD Card for best speed & reliability on Steam Deck.

Samsung EVO Select 512 GB microSD / microSDXC card

Valve’s Steam Deck supports microSDXC, which supports up to 2 TB per unit as per the standard. Typically more commercially available however, are cards with up to 1 TB of storage. SD cards are incredibly useful and in terms of actual real-life performance, you won’t notice much of a difference compared to the internal storage of the Steam Deck.

What to look for in a microSD card for Steam Deck #

  • V30 (Video Speed Class 30): minimum write speed of 30MB/s
  • U3 (UHS Speed Class 3): minimum write speed of 30MB/s
  • Storage capacity that fits your use case

The top microSD recommendation for Steam Deck (as of Q4 2022) #

Personally, I prefer the Samsung Evo Select microSD cards for my Steam Deck:

  • they have favourable reviews (5★), great build quality
  • relatively inexpensive at ~$58 at 🛒Amazon.com*, depending upon current offers
  • or ~43€ over at 🛒Amazon.de*
  • affiliate link, site may earn a tiny commission at no additional cost to you. Helps keep the site running <3

Samsung has a great track record in terms of SD card reliability, speed and price/performance ratio.

I chose the 512 GB variant pictured above, because that’s more than I need to store the games and ROMs that I actually play on my 256 GB Steam Deck. Of course the bigger variant of this card is just as great.

Some people go overboard and store a dozen of these SD cards in a case, in my humble opinion that only results in catalogueing/management overhead, i.e. having to figure out where you stored which game. Additionally, it only really brings analysis paralysis to the table and I find myself actually playing less.

Why getting an SD Card for your Steam Deck makes sense #

  • Installing Steam games on microSD expands your storage
  • You can pre-install bigger games for a longer vacation on a secondary or tertiary SD card and carry multiple with you
  • ROMs for Emulators (e.g. EmuDeck and RetroDeck are popular integrated solutions / installers) ideally live on microSD
  • You can reserve the fast internal storage for the games that actually need it (very few have immense load volume)
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