Some tech focused outlets, including Linus Tech Tips and The Phawx, were able to get out some early impressions on Valve's Steam Deck today. As part of their pre-release testing, these outlets tested the load times on the micro SD cards and compared it to the built-in SSD.
The tests conducted show that load times off of the SD cards are almost as fast as the built-in SSD across several titles. Games like Control, Street Fighter 5, and Dead Cells saw at most, a two second difference between the SD card loading and SSD loading. In other titles, there was no measurable difference in load times.
There were some outliers to this though. Games like Portal 2 and Ghostrunner lagged behind SSD load times by upwards of 17 seconds. Obviously, the Steam Deck is still not officially out yet until the end of the month. In addition, this device will undoubtedly be updated a lot in the months ahead as fixes and performance tweaks are made by Valve.
The takeaway here is that no matter which size Steam Deck you end up with, you should see some decently fast load times should you ever need to load games off of a micro SD card.
