The best SD cards for the Steam Deck

The Steam Deck is starting to find its way into players’ hands. Depending on the version you purchased, though, you may find yourself in need of some additional storage — the cheapest model of the Steam Deck offers only 64 GB of space for games. Thankfully, the Steam Deck features a microSD card slot, potentially offering similar speeds to the machine’s internal flash memory.

We’ve compiled a list of five great microSD cards for your Steam Deck, with a wide variety of both sizes and prices.

Steam Deck can only accept microSD cards. Full-size cards are not accepted.

These brands

Three things are important to consider when purchasing a microSD Card for Steam Deck. These include write speed (how fast it communicates with hardware), price and storage space. After much research we discovered three brands that balanced these factors well, SanDisk (and Lexar), and Samsung.

These three companies all offer many different microSD cards. If you’re less interested in the “best” microSD card, or just want to find one that perfectly fits your storage needs, grab a card from one of those three brands and you should have some success.

Five sizes, five choices

If you’re more interested in a specific recommendation, we’ve selected five cards varying in size and price, all of which should ensure you’re able to expand your Steam Deck’s storage without hurting your load times.

Our selection

We would choose the SanDisk Extreme 1 TB microSD Card if we needed to store our Steam Deck data. It costs $149.99. It’s the most expensive option on the list, but it offers a ton of space. Our editor-in-chief and Steam Deck reviewer, Chris Plante, personally recommends this card, saying that he couldn’t tell the difference between a game loading from it versus from the Steam Deck’s internal SSD. Its speed is enough to justify the price.

If you’re a big PC gamer and you know you’re never going to put your Steam Deck down once it arrives, we recommend opting for the 1 TB card right off the bat. If it’s out of your price range, though, or you just aren’t sure how much of an impact the Steam Deck will make on your life, consider picking up a smaller card, like the 128 GB SanDisk. If you find you’re using your Steam Deck a lot and keep running out of space, then you can always upgrade to a bigger card like the 512 GB Samsung card or the aforementioned 1 TB SanDisk Extreme card.