this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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Steam Deck

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Planning on buying a SteamDeck. What should I know before purchasing? (piefed.ca)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by pentastarm@piefed.ca to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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Optionally, what would you have wanted to know before you bought one?

Thanks!

Edit: Hey, thank you all very very much for your comments and suggestions, I really appreciate. I will most likely save up more and get the 1TB OLED model rather than the LCD model I was initially planning on. A couple of reasons for that, one, I am not good with electronics and I'd probably screw something up putting a new storage drive in. And two this thing will most likely be a permanent replacement for my old gaming laptop, which at this point is more than 10 years old, and seems to be on its last legs (I installed Linux on it, which was a struggle, but that is probably on me rather than Linux or the computer being at fault).

Anyway, I appreciate everyone's responses and thanks for helping a gal out!

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[–] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I have never had that issue with a sd card on either of my steam decks. That's weird and shouldn't happen.

I also haven't had to do any trouble shooting for games with a green good to go.

But mostly that SD thing, something else must be an issue. I install only to the SD card, does that matter?

[–] Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The SD card thing was something I definitely saw a ton of others with the issue of when I knew the exact description of what was happening, but it's been a few months.

When you go to install a game it does something to the effect of "provisioning space for game" and it was taking me minutes to hours before it would install some games. Installing to the onboard nvme ssd would get very fast rates that were bottlenecked by wifi attenuation mostly, and said provisioning time is instant.

The card I have is this PNY one. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DM9NNMND So far i'm using only maybe 15% of the space. I noticed it when I first got it and was downloading a couple of games, not even necessarily large ones.

[–] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah I haven't had that problem at all and I have put some pretty big games on them. I think the latest one I am using is a SanDisk 1TB Extreme microSDXC UHS

[–] Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Apparently the issue is games that have very many tiny files that aren't all inside of one larger file. This is a thread that sounds about right: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/tcomih/reserving_space_extremely_slow_on_sd_card/

So if a game is like GW2 and has nothing but a couple of extramassive files, it's very fast to allocate the space. If tha game has hundreds of thousands of very tiny files, it takes forever to allocate the space.

[–] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

That is really interesting, Thanks!