My recommendation is to go Sandisk Extreme. Ultra is literally 6x slower downloading games than the Extreme. 3.5 minutes vice 18.5 minutes. I've done the research. Go Extreme. The A2 MicroCenter cards are essentially rebranded Extremes and cheaper.
The important thing is the sequential read speed. This is the speed the card can maintain. The SanDisk Extreme had a sequential speed of 96-99mb/s. It's burst speed is 160mb/s or more. The burst speed is not sustainable. The sequential is what you care about. The ultra is 80mb/s. That's a loss of nearly 20mb/s.
They all perform very similar with read speeds, but extreme far out performs ultra in write speed. For write speeds, sandisk Extreme 77 MB/S VS sandisk ultra 30 MB/S. Lots of people on here like to post without doing any research, please dont be that guy. A2 is not slower than A1 when used with steam deck, they read at basically the same speed.
On 100 mb/s readers, the Samsung Evo Select has near equal random read and write performance to the Evo Pro and is cheaper than the Sandisk Extreme. Many games load off of Random read accesses. Discussion
That’s far quicker than the UHS-I bus found in the Steam Deck. Here are the best microSD cards. SanDisk Ultra microSD card. $33 $35 6% off Prices taken at time of publishing.
SteamOS is always going to be the best choice. It's actively developed specifically for the Steam Deck hardware, so you'll always have the best driver support and most features there. Additionally, you get benefits like shader cache and/or fixes to game issues introduced directly into the Proton compatibility layer.
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sandisk ultra vs extreme steam deck
