So I learned the hard way today that the Steam Deck is pretty picky about micro SD cards. According to some reading this is because it’s fake and thus I get the failing to validate error in the formatting. It was working, it suddenly wasn’t, I tried to fix it… Now I have a broken SD card lol. It wasn’t an issue in a Switch or an AYN Odin but I guess The Deck is a different beast and when you mess around without knowing what you’re doing you can mess up partitions permanently.
So as someone who has only had his deck in hand for a few days and hasn’t had a good experience yet (issues with using a dock, games not launching, incompatibility with my cellphone hotspots, etc), I wanna do research and make SURE there’s a way to purchase a micro SD that you can install and leave in there permanently without any recurring issues.
Now I got my Silicon Power 256 from New Egg, shipped by them. I see others posting about having issues with SanDisk from Amazon (the 1tb) etc etc.
Where would you go online to get a GUARANTEED working micro sd. Or would you say the only safe bet is going in person to a store somewhere and paying a premium?
Some of the manufacturers let you validate. E.g. through their support chat you can check the serial number of a Sandisk to ensure it’s legit. I also usually do an f3write / f3read cycle to confirm it has all the space it’s supposed to and get a rough sense of the sustained write and read speeds.