This is a pretty sad time to be a PC gamer, or any type of gamer really. Games are becoming more expensive, consuming more space, and the price of storage is increasing more and more.
Faced with this situation, I realized that I had had the solution in my hands all this time!
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My Laptop PC Accidentally Proved SD Cards Viable for Gaming
I had never considered using SD cards as storage media for PC games. Sure, my Nintendo 3DS and Switch consoles used SD cards for storage, but in my opinion, console games were optimized for this sort of thing, so I didn’t make the connection right away.
Then I got my first (and then second) portable gaming PC. These devices have a primary NVMe SSD, but it’s often a bit small. Unless you want to shell out money to replace it with a larger model, you can easily supplement its storage with an SD card. I was skeptical about it at first, but after testing the games I wanted to play on my laptop PC using the smaller SD cards I had lying around, I invested in a 512GB card and have had years of problem-free gaming with that card.
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Convenient? Yes. Reliable? By no means!
SSD prices made me rethink where games should really live
I recently had a fairly expensive NVMe SSD fail inside my gaming laptop, which is my main PC gaming machine. When looking for a replacement, I simply don’t have the budget or the heart to pay these prices for a terabyte or two of NVMe storage. Which means I’m stuck with my 1TB main drive and a 500MB/s external SATA SSD which is more than enough for modern games that don’t rely much on asset streaming.
Sorting games by their need for speed allows me to optimize which games can use that expensive NVMe storage and which would run just as well on the slower SATA SSD, but that begs the question: which games would run on a typical SD card?
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SD cards match the storage reality most PC games were designed for
SD cards come in a variety of speed classes, with typical UHS-I cards clocking in at between 90 and 120 MB/s. There are faster options, but they are also expensive. The cards I’m talking about are the type suitable for the original Nintendo Switch.
Those speeds are very comparable to mechanical hard drives in consoles like the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. PC games of that era were also designed with mechanical hard drives in mind. This is not theoretical, these are exactly the type of games I play on SD cards. Skyrim, Arkham Knight, dishonor or any game from the PS4 era or earlier is viable.
SD cards even have some advantages here, such as faster seek times than a mechanical hard drive. After all, they are still solid state.
Why SD cards also make sense in gaming desktops and laptops
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My gaming laptop has a built-in SD card slot, so now it seems like a no-brainer to use it to store and play games. Some desktop PCs have front-panel SD readers, and adding an SD card reader via USB can cost less than ten dollars.
You probably don’t have to go out and buy them specifically for this use either. I already had a bunch of 128 GB, 64 GB and 32 GB cards collected in drawers and other corners. If you treat them like game cartridges, that’s a lot of storage.
Strategic use of slow storage makes fast storage look bigger
The truth is that the vast majority of games don’t actually need the speeds that the latest SSDs offer. Older SSDs and even (for games from the generation I mentioned above) SD cards can do the job. Sure, you can also use mechanical units for these games, and that’s still viable in some desktop versions. But I think you probably have SD cards on hand and any mechanical hard drives still in use serve their purpose as a mass storage device for backup or media storage.
The best part about this is that you can try it yourself with little to no risk. Just grab an SD card of the appropriate speed (if you have one, of course) and try playing some games on your PC. While some games may take a few seconds longer to load, once the data is in RAM, they should run no differently than from a fast, sleek SSD. Reserve games that rely heavily on real-time asset streaming for your valuable SSD space and enjoy your classic PC games without emptying your wallet.
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