microsd for games viable compared to ssd?

One of my older hdd's is dying, it was for games only.

--I was checking around and I remembered that this pc has a microsd slot in it, and you can get a 256 GB microsd card for 40$ and a 128gb for $20, cheaper than a lot of ssd's in the same size range. Anyone done that? Are speeds while gaming and reliability as good for microsd over possible ssd replacements?

Defraggler says the random speed of a sandisk ultra plus 16gb microsd I had laying around is 13MB/s in that slot. 850EVO ssd is 64MB/s internal slot, kingston 240gb ssd 44MBs, wd 1tb hdd 1.31MBs, 125gb msata samsung 37MBS, dying 8 year old seagate drive is 1.34MBs. So it's a decent speed upgrade from the hdd's but much slower than the ssd's. I was fine with the gaming on the hdd and the 1tb wd hdd I have in here is also fine for gaming. But the benefits of 13x the speed for open world and heavy loading games might be good enough.

 

But wouldn't there be some more lag from the USB overhead?

On its face I don't see why not but have not personally tried. I have a 200gb minisd card at home but I'm out working on my car right now

 

The reliability, speed and endurance of flash drives are typically low compared to SSD NAND, you could do it though I would imagine but you would be much better off just buying an SSD to replace the dying drive, they are rather inexpensive these days.

 

Also remember that the microSD card doesn't have a built in controller nor any dram so it will choke under load and performance will drop massively.

I wouldn't recommend it.

 

The reason to try this was because in a laptop there are limited internal drive bays, I use my usb3 to sata cable all the time for smaller ssd's, hdd's on an external plugin basis. Another reason is that I can take my games with me and play them on other systems by simply just plugging in the microsd or with the usb3tosata cable to the other computer. My laptop has a direct plugin for microsd devices no need for usb use to connect it.


-----I've already put in an existing ssd to that internal slot, so there is no more room for another internal drive other than the microsd slot. The dying hdd drive actually has been fine since I took it out and just use it as needed with my sata to usb3 cable. SSD's are about 70 for 500gb and 120 for 1TB(in the store brand new) but if I only want to put 2-3 big games on non-heat producing-portable- media 128 or 256gb is fine.

---But using diskmark it does seem like it would be pretty slow, read speeds for the sandisk 16gb ultra plus were about 22Mbs whereas my 1TB WD HDD were about 66Mbs. This is a pretty old microsd though, the new ones in the store say at the minimum up to 100Mbs of which I would guess that means around 80Mbps real world. Idk I'll certainly try it and see for $20, at the very least the large size of microsd's now make it a very viable storage device for laptops.

 

Just depends on how the mSD card slot is hooked up, I owuld imagine many of them are just hooked to a USB 2.0 controller, not sure what the landscape is like for recently released stuff but I did like that PCIe micro cards were hitting the tech sites, not sure if that is on the shelves yet.

 

As mentioned before, though, without any sort of cache, performance of an SD card will tank when hit with lots of reads and writes.

 

Yeah I suspected that's what was meant and it's likely but I do have one of those adapters for microsd/sd for usb. I might try that in testing read speeds to confirm(usb2 speeds for both or not) with diskmark, this old machine has two usb3 slots but I'm pretty sure this cheap usb adapter is usb2. Not sure I could run down those techspecs on such an old machine.

Eh I'm adapting and as I mentioned for some reason the dying disk after taking it out and using it as external and running chkdsk on it has been fine playing games etc Important stuff is backed up already.

Ah well maybe I'll pass then, I did notice how agonizingly slow it was to just copy about 3gb file over to the microsd. How does nintendo switch do it then? I assume the branded microsd for that is for mostly storing games?

Right so if nintendo switch can do it with the same speed cards I'm certainly going to try, too bad no one had any real world experience with it though should have just stipulated that before soliciting opinions.

 

You're doing an awful lot of trying to justify it, just go for it and know that it may not perform well and may have endurance issues.

 

What kind of controller does the switch use?

Thats more important for your comparison. Not knocking it really, just that it may be in USB 2.0 medium. You can probably find that out on your machine.

 

Mine is on the PCI express bus and it performs poorly for this purpose even with the fastest media money can buy. This is one of those things where when you think about it you realize that if it worked well everyone would be doing it.

 

It's only my personal experience, but the load times when loading a game from the SD card versus loading the same game from a dedicated game cart on the Switch are far worse when loading from the SD card.

Another point of comparison (however it might not be an exactly fair comparison) is loading the Witcher 3 from the game cart on the Switch takes a good couple of minutes. However loading the Witcher 3 from an SSD on the PC is nearly instantaneous.

If you're going to try this, at least use a USB 3.0 flash drive. Should perform much better than an effectively USB 2.0 SD card.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FKN4T4H

Picked up the 128GB card for my car for music for $20 and the speeds are not too bad ~75MB/s

Conceivably that should be fast enough for the purpose stated.

 

I tried to move 60GB of music to a 200GB mini SD card last night and this morning it was still transferring. About 5 hours?

Not optimistic about its use for games but if anyone gives it a shot would still love to hear about it, especially if its USB 3.0, 2.0 just wouldnt hack it imho.

 

If you get a newer SD card with the proper ratings those speeds should pick up. Even if it's listed as a C10 on the card if it's an older card then it's not going to have the performance boost of the newer cards like I linked above.

I have a ton of these cards laying around from over the years and they all perform at different speeds depending on the additional specs implemented at the time. C10 though in general supports 10MB/s whereas the newer cards designed for apps can see upwards of about 100MB/s w/o going into extreme territory for price/performance over $100's of dollars for pro prhotog's with raw images.

 

Im waiting for the PCIe enabled cards to finally hit the market, would be lovely

 

Not sure what you're talking about as there are tons of PCIE adapters for different cards / formats whether you're taking M/2 SATA or NVME or port multipliers for SATA drives. There are even SD applications that plug into PCIE slots as expansions or front panel slots. SD is just a format for consumer electronics that are portable / low power requirement due to being on battery power.

 

Not an adapter, a pcie based SD card. There were demos for it not too long ago.

I don't care much for nvme, I don't have workloads dense enough for it.

 

I guess that's really thinking outside the box when there are so many options whether it's a m.s sata drive you put into a pcie adapter card.... the most expansion slots I've seen are 4-8 depending on the card and how deep your pockets are.

https://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/21377/putting-multiple-nvme-m2-ssds-/p1

https://www.amazon.com/Dual-Micro-SDXC-SDHC-Adapter/dp/B00KZIB90W

 

Those are adapters, Im not talking about adapters.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12487/western-digital-displays-sd-card-with-pcie-interface

This is older than I remember, but another one...

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/pl...with_PCIe_and_NVMe_Interfaces_White_Paper.pdf

I remember reading an article where they covered the actual card in masking tape but cant find it. Was a proof of concept at the time, but we havent seen anything in the market (or at least havent seen it)

 

I think you mean the SD Express standard, yeah I remember that Anandtech article.

If I recall from another article, first retail memory products were expected to be released sometime this year with the first cameras etc supporting the standard coming out in 2021.


Looks like they recently updated the spec:
https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/05/25/sd-express-delivers-new-gigabyte-speeds-for-sd-memory-cards/

 

The drive uses the existing UHS-II/III pins to construct a PCIe 3.0 x1 interface with the system (via a mechanical adapter) and probably standard PCIe voltage with a converter.

SD card with a PCIe interface is not standard and will not hit the market any time soon

problems that the SD Card Association and its member face is support for UHS-II/UHS-III in host devices

only devices that use the UHS-II are higher-end DSLR cameras

When the SD standard adopts PCIe, manufacturers of various special-purpose PCs/servers will benefit, but producers of consumer electronics may (again) be unwilling to incorporate new controllers into their products due to lack of immediate benefits and power consumption concerns

PP 9 of the PDF showing the speed martrix is helpful in deciding on currently available technology.....
***************************************************************************************************************************

The only issues I see besides it being a dream still at this point other than a clunky PoC w/ adapter.... The price is going to be sky high on this sort of "drive" option for quite awhile. There's no room to put a controller on the chip, there seems to be a need for the SD adapter to hold the mSD. Some applications will permit such a size difference like the DSLR mentioned. As mentioned retooling the host readers in either pc/laptop/portable will take a while to catch up as well.

At the price point outside of a niche application this may only be released to OEM applications. With the speeds though in comparison a NVME in an enclosure will hit those on a 3.2x1 port.

Advances to USB4 / PCIE4 just around the corner will likely table this for even longer on a mass production scale. There are already some systems in play getting closure to the 5GB/s drives breaking beyond the pci 3 x4 speeds that are just now becoming common place in the last couple of years. Most consumer applications needing speed / capacity are using the T5/T7 drives or something similar to them like the PNY Pro.

The other issue with this type of memory is it's going to get really toasty wherever it's connecting to whether an SD reader or direct application inside a device. I've seen reviews of products where hitting thermal thresholds have melted devices and ports they were plugged into. While not common it's still a potential if a safeguard fails to shut down the drive until things cool off.

Now with the NVME enclosure.... there's a new chip out that seems to alleviate some of the heat issue in the way that it handles the data RTL9210 based enclosures do seem to perform better than their counterparts J Micron / AS Media. The speeds are a bit more consistent as well.

Now the density / work loads.... it's a tough sell for making a purchase decision when NVME drives are more competitive than SATA/NGFF when it comes to price / capacity / TBW / warranty and so on. There's a premium now on older technology versus the newer standards which is a bit counter intuitive to the way things used to work when something new was released the price on the existing would drop after a little while.

Really at this point it's all localized speeds since to get beyond 100MB/s over a network you need to get into 10GE territory which gets you closer to 1GB/s but then you have to have a destination that supports the same speeds and that's going to take similar drives on that end or a faster RAID setup to hit the transfer speeds.

10GE ports on a laptop typically need a TB3 adapter to add one to a system and those are ~$300. On the PC side in a case you can do 10GE for ~$100. The sweet spot right now would probably a 2.5GE / 5GE but that has been slow to roll out since the costs for those chips / speeds is still considerably higher than just moving to a 10GE and calling it a day.

It's a bit of a rabbit hole to get point to point data speeds across an ecosystem.

 

its a proof of concept dude, its of course its going to be used via an adapter when its not currently an adopted standard.

NVME enclosures arent a good solution at all, I already assisted the military in doing exactly that for hot swap OS drives and into the field 80% of the drives came back no longer functioning 1 month after deployment.

 

Okay... MIL spec field use is a totally different ball game as well using them for a hot swap OS. 80% failure of NVME w/o adequate protection makes sense since you're competing with the controller heat issues / venting of enclosures or hitting throttle issues because you can't.

I can see the need for compact and internalized needs due to not wanting to get things snagged on something and breaking off like a USB stick. ,For hot swap OS / run from other than traditional sata/pcie I suspect they would be using a linux based OS or something other than Windows in a traditional sense.

I can't think of a solution that meets all of the requirements that will stand up to the case use at least in the consumer market. There are pico options but, there's still that slight chance of it getting snagged and with the lack of protrusion, the heat issue comes back into play w/ potential melt down of the card / adapter / port.

 

They werent carrying around bare PCB's as you make it sound, and no, Linux was not utilized. They were enclosed and sealed when not in use, but that didnt keep the NVME drives in a functional state because there are elements outside of the enclosures that have to be accounted for, I wasnt the account manager, so it wasnt my problem beyond telling them its not going to be a good investment and keeping it together when they started coming back before I was even done with the project. "MIL spec" is just a keyword for a majority of what they use, it doesnt change much, in fact they wouldve been better off with a standard laptop, of which a majority of other military sites did, and despite the laptops they ordered being cheap garbage they are still in use.

All I stated is that this method would be a nice solution for what the OP is looking for if it was available for consumers, no where did I say that it was a perfect technology with 0 drawbacks. Such a thing exists exactly no where.

All this critique because you didnt understand that I wasnt speaking about currently existing 3rd party adapters for devices I wasnt talking about? Jeez, You win dude, I have absolutely no desire to participate in this thread anymore.

Unsubbed.

 

Yeah I think the read speeds would be the most important but I get the point, it did take a lot longer to write to for a few gb's. Yeah Switch probably has a pretty high speed interface. It's really just trying to find another free slot for an internal drive for games, I've already filled the hdd slot with an ssd but that's already full of my best and most demanding games. It's also only half as big as the 500 hdd. Well when the 500 hdd finally dies then I'll try this out or just get another 1tb 2.5 hdd and take out the ssd I've got in there. Would be good to have 128gb microsd sandisk image mate, they're 23.50 in store. Says up to 100 Mbps on the box. Even just to store more things on that just stays in the slot.

 

SSD prices are supposed to keep dropping through the end of the year into next year about another 15% or so. Maybe hold out and you can just get a new SSD and not have to compromise on speed and endurance.

 

Yeah but you can't buy in the store ssd's lower than 500gb and for various reasons I'm limited to in store right now only. The ppgb(if not quality) is within range, 64 for 500 .128 wd blue ssd, and 23.50 for 128 .183 sandisk image mate, but with a lower total cost per item.

Otherwise it's really just onto eb for a tb range hdd replacement for 30$. Probably will just wait until the failing drive dies, frankly it has a lot of older games I haven't played in a long time but I just don't want to uninstall like MGSV, batman arkham series, bioshock, deadspace series, sekiro, old fallouts etc and a few new games. The old ones probably could benefit from a new install when I actually want to play them again anyways. I juggle ssd games but ACodyssey/Origins, Witcher 3, KCD, GTA5, thehunter cow. Fallout 4/Prey.

Diskmark read for my ssd's are over 500 Mbps, hdd was 65Mbps and this old sandisk 16gb was 22 Mbps lol

Still it would be awesome if the speeds of microsd's could be ssd speeds and the other qualities of ssd's, all those drive bays in laptops could be filled up with a desktop 2080ti and the fans needed lol

 

My friend, there is an old saying about getting what you pay for... It may be quite a while before there would be a micro-SD for $25 that would fit a standard adapter and equal an SSD in performance. OTOH, good quality 1TB SSD's are now selling for less than $90 on Amazon (you could probably do better elsewhere), so you could simply replace the smaller of your SSD's with a larger one.. Not sure why you would be looking for smaller and smaller SSD's...
Good luck with your quest.

 

No quest but a laptop has limited internal slots was just looking to see if the sd slot could be utilized like an ssd for improved games performance at that lower price is all. Yeah I can get a wd blue 1 TB ssd at wallyworld for 105 now if I wanted to. I have about 628 gb of ssd space all full, games that benefit are so big now.

 

A bit off-topic but related somehow. I noticed that I don't play more than 3 games at the same time, so I do ok with 2 TB of storage, this being HDD/SSD or NVMe. But what happens with FHD movies, and FHD tv shows I need a huge capacity for this content. So what I did I bought a mid-size PC with a motherboard with 6 SATA ports, and populated this SATA ports with 2 or 4 TB HDD and solved my issue for a couple of years.

Anyway I think that in the next couple of years everything is going to be cloud based, we just need better internet connections for that to be as good as a home storage and also better WiFi connections. I'm going to be testing 802.11AX soon, so maybe we're close to real 1 Gbps wireless connections (?). In 2x2 802.11AC I'm not able to get more than 350-400 Mbps

 

FHD content... sure it takes up 4-6GB/hr in MPEG2 format but, if you convert it to MP4 it drops by 80%. I do this with automated software by MCEBuddy and it can also strip the commercials out of the files as well. It does okay with movies as well but, some features get stripped out that might be more desirable in the original format.

You don't need AX to get speeds over what you're currently seeing. Sure an AX card in your laptop or desktop makes sense since they're ~$20. I would double check your channel / configurations. If there's a lot of competing SSID's around you on a particular channel then switching channels will help. Also the bandwidth allocation whether 20/40/80/160 on the 5Ghz side will make a difference as well. I was able to get a full 1.7gbps link up with a couple of different routers and a AX200 card. The router I got the link rate was R7800/X4S configuring it with 160mhz channel bandwidth and getting the wifi card settings correct to match up. The downside though of 1.7gbps is you have to figure out how to get the full throughput to your other lan devices since the bottleneck will be the router due to the lack of LAG/LACP options. The plus side on wifi I was able to get full speed 1 gig speed on speed tests and downloads.

Using the AX card and a QCA-2600 in my setup I usually hit the max speeds minus overhead around 60-70MB/s across wifi which is sufficient for most things. Wishful thinking though would be a lot higher on the LAN side but, for whatever reason hostapd won't work with 160mhz for some reason to allow the higher bandwidth but, the only time that would be really nice to have is if I'm syncing a drive with a ton of files. That's when the long ethernet cable comes out to speed things up a bit.

 

Well my wireless router can only do 40/80 MHz channels and 2x2, so my maximum throughput available is 866 Mbps, I think the overhead is around 20% of the maximum throughput so my maximum theoric useful bandwidth is around 700 Mbps best case. I also think my router is pretty cheap, is the one that my ISP of fiber gave me. I'm pretty close to the router, but I've never got anything over 400 Mbps. Also the uplink is unstable as hell, my uplink is always jumping from 866 to 433 Mbps I have no idea why. Now you're probably right and with a better router I could increase the performance, but AX is now cheap enough to buy an AX router and an AX WiFi card and forget about AC for good.

 

Certainly sounds like the router/card could be the issue. Fluctuating link speeds just indicate there's an issue but as to which piece it is can be a toss up w/o further testing. A good indicator would be checking the signal quality with your phone and an app signal analyzer to check the channels / signal quality. If the router is functioning correctly the signal should be fairly level between app refreshes.

AX will give you the fastest speeds within 10-20 feet of the router and the device due to the frequencies they use to obtain those speeds. In most cases you'll be speed shifted to AC frequencies / speeds. Now if you were to mesh the AX signals throughout the space you should be able to maintain those speeds whenever you're close enough to pick up the higher band stably.

I know when I put an AX card in my laptop the speeds weren't all that stellar even though the Intel drivers picked up the card and it was functional. Once I went ahead and updated them though the speeds and signal improved to what they should be.

There are plenty of AX options though when it comes to routers.... dig around and do some research on them before picking one. Maybe consider using Amazon for the free no questions asked returns if you find you don't like the performance or it's not giving you a steady link state while connected or randomly reboots itself. I had a couple of those issues with a 2600 Synology router that got replaced with the Netgear but, the Netgear gets jumpy as well depending on the FW of the week they released.

 

back on topic I tried micro sd/sd cards and the load time were pretty bad and gaming well expect lag spikes

 

Yeah still haven't really tried it yet I did drag over ground zeroes which is only like 3 gb onto my old 16 GB sandisk pro plus(which is advertised as up to 80mbps reads, only gets 22mbps reads on my system), it took a lot longer to transfer it over than hdd.

I think to save space in the future this just opens up 128-256GB or more as prices drop microsd to leave in the slot for music/video/pics so as to save space on the internal hdd's. I'm assuming even installing programs and running off it would work in most cases too. My dying hdd is used as an external on demand with my usb32sata cable hasn't had any problems, it made my system buggy when it was still plugged into internal slot like bootup etc glad to have it out of there. The ssd I used to just plug in externally is now in that slot and have not had any system bugginess etc since then.

I'm seeing the light when it comes to playing a game then uninstalling it when I don't play it much to have the space for new games, at least on ssd lol Still I'll try ground zeroes and see, I'm only at 1080p and in some newer games 900p wondering if that makes a difference over running higher resolution?

 

Thing is if you intend to run programs, you need to look past just the sequential transfer speed, what's more important here (assuming you have a fast SD Card) is the 4k random reads /writes performance which is going to be terrible on sd cards, in some cases worse than a spinning hard drive. There maybe some high end SD Cards that maybe good enough for this.