For UK folks, you can now double your Steam Deck storage (!) for £47, or triple (!!) your storage for £132. Meanwhile, over in the US, you’ll pay $65 or $136, respectively. Either way, you’re getting a good deal on a high performance Micro SD card that works surprisingly well* in the Steam Deck versus the built-in SSD. For those of you in the UK, the best deals we’ve found on Steam Deck suitable Micro SD cards are on the Integral 512GB and the Lexar Play 1TB. Both are relatively fast cards, with the Integral rated for 100MB/s reads and the Lexar Play up to 150MB/s, which should provide great performance when loading up games based on their ‘A1’ and ‘A2’ ratings which require 500 IOPS and 2000 IOPS random read speeds, respectively.
Get the Integral 512GB Micro SD card for £47 (was £59) Get the Lexar Play 1TB Micro SD card for £132 (was £145)
In the US, we have the Lexar Play 1TB once again, in addition to the Samsung Evo Select which offers even faster operation than the Integral card we recommend for the UK, thanks to a maximum read speed of 130MB/s. Both of these cards are A2 rated, meaning their random read speeds are very competitive.
Get the Integral 512GB Micro SD card for $65 (was $85) Get the Lexar Play 1TB Micro SD card for $136 (was $250)
Either way, you should be quite happy with the level of performance provided - although if you want RPS tested performance, then do check out James’ recommendations as well! *Seriously, it should not normally be possible for Micro SD cards to be near-identical to an SSD in performance, but based on our testing Valve are working some magic here to keep load times way down. Of course, these Micro SD cards aren’t just good for the Steam Deck. They’ll also work well in the Nintendo Switch, drones, action cams, smartphones and many other places - although for the Switch and smartphones, you could probably get away with cheaper lower-performance alternatives!
