Bought this kingston xs2000 a while ago. It's officially rated for "up to" 2000Mb\s read\write but slows to a crawl after 30GB have been copied. Fyi, I'm copying files from an internal nvme (samsung 980 pro) via a usb 3.0 cable, so this kingston ssd is the only bottleneck.
TLC flash and no DRAM will do that. 😢
Not even TLC, practically all external brand SSDs are cheap QLC. That's why I prefer to choose a good internal NVMe stick and a good enclosure.
I have seen some ssds for the steam deck listed as having no dram. So, I’m happy to see your comment, I had no idea that it was this important.
Should I just skip and ssd that doesn’t have dram?
DRAM-less is fine for the deck. Playing games is mostly large reads and small writes for saves. When writing you're likely downloading which is going to be the slowest link in the chain. As you saw with this external drive, it could write quickly for 30GB. Getting bigger for less money is gonna be worth it, especially with the limited physical size of a 2230.
The key metric is game load times, which don't change much even for desktop systems on drives that read 400MB/s or 5GB/s. So don't worry about it too much.
Thanks for the heads up that makes a lot of sense. I’m generally happy with my sd card, so it can’t be worse than that.
What's another better option for this use case, that you would look at?
Check reviews that test writes over ~15 minutes. This kingston holds out the longest but then has a very low floor https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/cqJ6pXctEd5BKJVLJN7TCD-1200-80.png
It's a worst case senario for all drives though, and they will drop in throughtput. Caches run out, heat build up, power supply gets strained, it's rough.