Does Your Steam Deck SD Card Affect Game Loading Times?

howtogeek.com:

While upgrading your Steam Deck’s SSD is easier than you might think, it’s still a fairly complex procedure. Expanding your Steam Deck’s storage with an SD card is way simpler and doesn’t require opening the thing. But does using slower SD cards increase game loading times? Let’s find out.

Not All SD Cards Are Equal on the Deck These Are the SD Cards We're Testing Silicon Power Elite U1 128GB MicroSDXC SanDisk Ultra 128GB U1/A1 MicroSDXC Samsung EVO Plus 128GB U3/A2 MicroSDXC Western Digital WD SN740 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Steam Deck Internal SSD vs. SD Card Benchmarks The Results Are In

The Steam Deck has an SD card slot that supports UHS-I —also known as UHS-1— SD cards, topping out at about 104MBps for read and write performance. In other words, if you plan on getting an SD card for your Deck, you’re limited to UHS-I models. But not all UHS-I SD cards are equal.

On the one hand, you’ve got older models with read and write speeds of 50MBps or less, notably below the Deck’s SD card slot specs. On the other hand, some high-end UHS-I cards feature read and write speeds that go over the Deck’s max specs. For instance, Samsung’s latest high-end SD card lineup, the Pro Plus, features read rates of up to 180MBps and up to 130MBps write performance.

UHS-I SD cards come in two flavors regarding minimum read/write speed: UHS Speed Class 1 (U1) models have a minimum read/write performance of 10MBps, while UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) cards have a minimum read/write speed of 30MBps.

You also have the A1 and A2 cards —also known as Application Performance Class 1 and 2— featuring higher random read and write speeds than non-A1/A2 models, which should lead to faster game loading times since loading a game is more or less a random read