this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
20 points (100.0% liked)
Steam Deck
14797 readers
75 users here now
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Windows doesn't always play nice, windows updates will frequently break the bootloader and prevent SteamOS from booting. If you don't plan to use windows as your main OS I'd probably recommend installing it to a microSD. Performance may take a bit of a hit, but it's safer and much less likely to cause issues with the device as a whole.
I wouldn't say it's safer since it will significantly more quickly kill the SD card itself, but from a year of using Windows and SteamOS, the bootloader break can be solved pretty easily since there's an easy script on SteamOS to fix it and you can always disable Windows updates if they are annoying. Ultimately a matter of preference on what's preferred though, but just good to know the pros and cons of each option!
Nicer microSD cards now claim to have comparable or better numbers of write cycles compared with average SSDs. Samsung claims their nicer cards have 100,000 writes per sector for example, while many SSDs seem to report having 40,000-100,000.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like running windows on a microSD should be fine. You can always go with a cheaper card too if you want low risk.
My understanding is many SD cards have sub-optimal wear leveling compared with SSDs so there may be more to it than just writes per sector.
It's certainly possible their write distribution isn't as good as SSD's. Honestly it feels like there should be a bigger tradeoff I'm not seeing in my reading here, so I'm kinda hoping someone knowledgeable on the subject will jump in and confirm or deny.
But ultimately I don't think that using a microSD for running windows is necessarily a terrible idea, sounds like it could work out ok.
In cases like those, I believe you'd be correct that they wouldn't be too bad on difference, but from my understanding that's not the norm for SD cards so for most people it'll be a big risk. But that's good pointing it out though, especially for anybody with an SD card of that power, thanks for mentioning that part!