# Can games be installed to a microsd card?



## 1nf3rn0x (Dec 7, 2013)

Bought a netbook/tablet and I've seen people gaming on the same model saying they have installed games on a microsd card. Is this possible?


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## qubit (Dec 7, 2013)

If the microssd card can be formatted and accessed in the same way as any other storage drive and appears in Windows Explorer like any other drive then I don't see why not.


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## 1nf3rn0x (Dec 7, 2013)

qubit said:


> If the microssd card can be formatted and accessed in the same way as any other storage drive and appears in Windows Explorer like any other drive then I don't see why not.


Ok well yep it's in windows explorer, it's just formatted as FAT32 at the moment. What would be better NTFS or exFAT?


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## qubit (Dec 7, 2013)

It should work the same with FAT32 format as NTFS. The main two differences are the loss of any kind of file security settings and journaling, making it much more sensitive to errors leading to data loss. Of greater importance is the capacity of the card - what is it?

Do you have a Steam account? You can try installing a game on the card, as the client nowadays handily allows you to store different games in different locations.


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## 1nf3rn0x (Dec 7, 2013)

qubit said:


> It should work the same with FAT32 format as NTFS. The main two differences are the loss of any kind of file security settings and journaling, making it much more sensitive to errors leading to data loss. Of greater importance is the capacity of the card - what is it?
> 
> Do you have a Steam account? You can try installing a game on the card, as the client nowadays handily allows you to store different games in different locations.


Card is a 64GB Class 10, and yeah going to do that soon, still installing all my programs. Only got it today


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## The Von Matrices (Dec 7, 2013)

qubit said:


> It should work the same with FAT32 format as NTFS. The main two differences are the loss of any kind of file security settings and journaling, making it much more sensitive to errors leading to data loss.



FAT32 also has a 4GiB size limit for individual files while NTFS does not.  I don't know of any games that have individual files anywhere near that large, but it's worth considering.


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## qubit (Dec 7, 2013)

Great, let us know how you get on. 

btw what does "class 10" mean? _<qubit flaunts his ignorance of the subject, lol>_


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## The Von Matrices (Dec 7, 2013)

qubit said:


> btw what does "class 10" mean? _<qubit flaunts his ignorance of the subject, lol>_



It's a standard designation by the SD association stating that the card has minimum sequential read and write speeds of 10MB/s.


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## 1nf3rn0x (Dec 7, 2013)

qubit said:


> Great, let us know how you get on.
> 
> btw what does "class 10" mean? _<qubit flaunts his ignorance of the subject, lol>_



Works  just installed HL2


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## micropage7 (Dec 7, 2013)

could be portable version or like that, but since memory card (microsd) has enough speed i guess its pretty common now


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## The Von Matrices (Dec 7, 2013)

micropage7 said:


> could be portable version or like that, but since memory card (microsd) has enough speed i guess its pretty common now



For small files, the random read and write speeds on SD cards are atrocious compared to internal memory.  SD cards are still only good for storing small numbers of large files like photos, videos, and music.  Look at this benchmark of a lot of microSD cards at 4K reads and writes.  There no correlation between class rating and behavior at small file sizes; class rating only matters at sequential reads and writes (i.e large file sizes.)   Most of the cards get only a few KB/s at random writes.

The only reason a game is playable is because on a SD card is because it is loaded into system memory before executing.  Anything demanding real time reads and writes is basically impossible to do with a SD card.


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