Test Reveals Steam Deck Loads from Micro SD Almost as Quick as Internal SSD

gamerant.com:

Announced last summer, the Steam Deck has the potential to take the mobile gaming world by storm. True that Valve's past hardware exploits have not always been successful, but this time around it's looking more and more like the upcoming handheld PC could be one of the most exciting devices to hit the recent market. Results are coming in from testers and developers, and the world is frequently hearing about the overall hardware and how well it performs. One recent test shows the difference between the internal and external storage.

According to a recent report from PC Gamer, which references a couple of videos from reviewers, the Steam Deck has been seen running games using both the built-in SSD and a micro SD. The results show that, while they aren't always perfectly in-sync, there's very little difference in loading times, suggesting that anyone who wishes to use an external storage device won't really suffer from slow loading when compared to the solid state hard drive.

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In one video, Linus Tech Tips shows two identical Decks side-by-side. They then simultaneously load up Control on both, and whether using an SD card or the internal SSD, the game loaded up quickly with very little, if any, discretion between them. Another video showed a similar experiment, and while Valve's own Portal 2 did take a little longer to boot into the opening cut scene using the micros SD, around 13 seconds in fact, there was not much difference between overall loading times.

This should be good news for a lot of people who have been waiting in the wings for the device to finally get released. With the cheapest Steam Deck model having 64 GB of storage, some may have been