Samsung’s fast Evo Select Micro SD card has dropped to £40 on Amazon UK, making it a good time to upgrade the storage of your Steam Deck. This card normally retails closer to £50, with a stated UK RRP of £55, but it has dipped as low as £37.99 for a few days over the past year.
Still, this is a very reasonable price for a memory card that’s good for up to 130MB/s sequential reads and meets the A2 requirements for random performance.
The Samsung Evo Select isn’t one of the memory cards we highlighted in our recent best Micro SD cards for Steam Deck article, but this card is the spitting image of the Samsung Pro Plus that’s our current top pick. It looks like the Pro Plus is slightly faster in terms of reads, at 160MB/s maximum, but the card does cost significantly more at £57 – so I’d be tempted to go for the cheaper option highlighted here!
In general, we found relatively difference in game load times on Steam Deck, with the faster cards pulling ahead by less than a second at best in games like Aperture Desk Job and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, even compared to the faster internal storage. That means the actual process of copying data to the card (like copying game folders or homebrew ROMs) will be a bit faster on the Pro Plus model, but in actual use the Evo Select will be much the same.
Of course, the Evo Select highlighted here isn’t just good for the Steam Deck – you’ll also find it handy for smartphones, drones, cameras and indeed pretty much anything with a Micro SD card slot, even the Switch.
I hope this deal was useful, and stay tuned for one more before I shuffle off for the weekend!
