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Comment by laidoffamazon | Hacker News Reader

I’m still surprised the steam deck runs so well even with games installed to microSD - I’m not sure how they do it.

The answer is probably that disk read speed just isn't that important for casual applications like games.

We had a lot of great games even when storage was spinning rust.

It’s actually essential for more serious games without loading screens, which is why for example the PS5 ships with and mandates fast SSDs.

I would guess that's only a small percentage of popular games, though. The Steam Deck and the PS5 probably don't attract the same kind of gamer.

Grand theft auto games on the PS2 ran without loading screens

Many games have done it historically, almost always with trade offs.

Today it’s possible to do it in almost any game if you are guaranteed a fast SSD and the consoles do that.

Yeah, I am using my Deck with 512GB sdcard and could never tell it is actually running from sdcard. It does a lot of game updates and always finishes those in reasonable time, at least for me. That card is going strong with all the writes going on on steam deck

decent SD cards can do 200 or 300 MB/s of reads now

Those speeds are... complicated.

UHS-I cards easily go up to 100MB/s. This is the baseline for a modern SD card.

After that you can add more pins for UHS-II. This is used in a bunch of devices and goes up to 300MB/s, but you can't assume anything will have it. And UHS-III was dead on arrival.

Alternatively you can add a different set of more pins for SD Express. It can do gigabytes per second and is probably the future. It's backwards compatible with UHS-I, but not II or III.

And also SanDisk made their own spec for overclocking UHS-I which some things support. It can do about 200MB/s.

The steam deck supports none of those upgrade paths. You get about 100MB/s.

Not in the Steam Deck, it maxes out at 104Mb/s.

Considering the insane tempuratures the cards reach, and that it destroys brand new SD cards, I don't want them going any faster until it works safely.

The Steam Deck only supports up to UHS-I. There are UHS-II and UHS-III cards out there that support higher bandwidth.

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