[Solved] Anyone know if those Samsung Miscro sd cards work well on the Steam Deck?

ekZepp@lemmy.world to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 39 points –

Also anyone can tell me the difference in performance between the white one and the blue one??

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Select is the one exclusive for Amazon, my understanding is that it’s meant to help with counterfeit ones, as only Amazon has them. Very good cards either way.

Not sure how it compares price wise right now, but look at the Amazon basics ones too: they’re made by the same company that bought Lexar and makes the emmc inside the 64gb Deck. Mine has been going strong for about a year now. Speed wise they’re essentially the same: the standard used in the Deck tops out at 104 megabytes per second, so any claims of extra speed are just marketing.

BTW is normal that the free space on the 64 Steam Deck is actually 40-something gb?? I mean 20gb of OS?

Additionally, to what was already said, the size of storage is giving in Decimal (1000B based) while after formatting it is often shown in Binary (1024B based), which makes the storage look smaller, which it isn't.

And the most of the storage is coming from software stored in your home, not the OS itself. The OS only occupies around 3.3GB on the 5GB root partition:

/dev/nvme0n1p4  5.0G  3.3G  1.5G  69% /
/dev/nvme0n1p6  230M   41M  173M  19% /var
/dev/nvme0n1p8  466G  115G  351G  25% /home

It should be noted that the way you listed the partitions misses the dual (A/B) install method that the deck uses. There are 2 identical size partitions for root, var, and EFI. When an update occurs. The system installs the new update on the inactive set of partitions and then tells the UEFI to use the other set on the next boot. That doesn't matter too much for 512GB models like your's, but the extra ~5.5GB for the redundant partition layout can be significant for 64GB models.

I've used df -h and that showed only this three partitions. I've only skipped the tmpfs mounts.

The df command only shows mounted devices and filesystems. You can use lsblk to show all block devices and their partitions. To format it more nicely to show the labels for each partition, you can use these options: lsblk -o name,mountpoint,partlabel,size.

This is the output from my deck without the microsd card:

deck@steamdeck ~> lsblk -o name,mountpoint,partlabel,size
NAME        MOUNT PARTLABEL   SIZE
nvme0n1                     476.9G
├─nvme0n1p1       esp          64M
├─nvme0n1p2       efi-A        32M
├─nvme0n1p3       efi-B        32M
├─nvme0n1p4 /     rootfs-A      5G
├─nvme0n1p5       rootfs-B      5G
├─nvme0n1p6 /var  var-A       256M
├─nvme0n1p7       var-B       256M
└─nvme0n1p8 /home home      466.3G

Its on the low side but still within reason. Its not just an OS, it's an OS, a full steam install, a web browser( actually 2 of them because steam also packs an embedded browser), a desktop environment, HD animations, HD wallpapers (several of them) and it adds up quick.

Just buy an nvme SSD, the one in the deck is really easy to replace (if you have a good screwdriver, like in the ifixit kit/ other phone repair kits)

Yep. The os isn’t tiny, plus there’s all sorts of extra stuff. For example 1gb is gone on every Deck because that’s reserved for swap… and then shader cache sneaks in and depending on the game you might run out of space in no time.

I don't even know why they have a 64GB version.

This is the one I use. I believe you want to look for the "A2" SD card. No issues with speed or reliability yet. I play ges like Elden Ring and RDR2.

https://a.co/d/7pFQpEB

Not everyone is playin triple A titles, for someone like me who prefer old or/and 2.5D games (which are usually under 10Gib), the 64gb variant would be mostly fine.

IIRC, it was 20GB of OS at launch, but they shrunk it. Now it's a little over 10GB.