play PC games off SD card

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Steve Perez

Steve Perez

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Jun 13, 2013
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for storage space reasons, does anyone know if you can play your PC games off an SD card, and can you even install your steam games to a SD card or USB flash drive?
 
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dwatterworth
You can set that up easily in Steam. Just go to the options menu and create a new steam directory in whatever location or on whatever device you want to. In order to get anywhere close to a decent transfer rate on an SD card, you are going to want a class 10 SD card connected to a USB 3.0 capable card reader. Otherwise you'll be sitting at the load screens for longer than you'll be playing the game.
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dwatterworth

dwatterworth

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You can set that up easily in Steam. Just go to the options menu and create a new steam directory in whatever location or on whatever device you want to. In order to get anywhere close to a decent transfer rate on an SD card, you are going to want a class 10 SD card connected to a USB 3.0 capable card reader. Otherwise you'll be sitting at the load screens for longer than you'll be playing the game.
 
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menetlaus

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You would be best off by using a USB3 drive, if the hardware in the stick is fast enough it can get into the range of standard hard drive transfer rates. Ideally if you can find a review of one that gets >40MB/s transfer and >1MB/s on random 4k reads you might not notice much of a difference.

On the other hand, slow USB2 or SD saves will take FOREVER to load... if you need to load 1GB of files for the game a standard drive will do it in under 20s (or so) while a USB/SD at 10MB/s will take well over 100seconds to load the same files.
 
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Steve Perez

Steve Perez

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Jun 13, 2013
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Alright. Reason I ask is cause I bought a lenovo yoga pro 2 for light gaming but I bought the 128gb ssd version. Its actually running COD ghosts a very playable fps. Albeit its on like on 1152x864 and low settings. But as you know its a big install. Once the game gets going off a SD card will it still be slow or is it just longer loading times?
 
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dwatterworth

dwatterworth

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It will be slow whenever it needs to access any information on the SD card. A good class 10 SD card over USB 3.0 will hit ~15mb/s. That's about 1/10 the speed you'll see from a decent external HDD over USB 3.0.

You'll see long load times and possible stuttering or crashing if the game needs to load textures incrementally in a level. Think back to games where you run out the end of a tunnel that breaks into a new zone with new textures/geometry except possibly much more often if the game can't load everything into system memory.
 
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Tarek Yeh

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Apr 24, 2014
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Hey man have your tryed to run games on your sd card ..as im going for the same solution soon
 
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