Running apps/games off an SD card?

[Cyberdemon]

Contemplating a new laptop build with an SSD and was wondering if anyone had any experience installing and running any heavy apps (games) off of an SD card?

The thought is if I go with a smaller SSD there are a couple games I'd like to play (each which end up being 4-8 gigs installed) that would fit nicely on a stack of old SD cards but I'm wondering if the performance would be too slow off a Class 6 card.

Basically wondering if it's worth the investment to jump from a 128gig SSD to a 256, or ditch the optical drive for a bay mounted HDD.

Thoughts?

 

[Joe Average]

It's just another form of storage, based on Flash-RAM media, so it'll work like any other form of storage but it's going to be MUCH slower than most anything else out there. While the random access times are low (similar to an SSD) the sheer transfer rates are where you're going to get murdered, especially if whatever apps you intend to use happen to have lots of small files, < 4KB in size.

If you think SSDs take hits with < 4KB files, SD cards get outright murdered by 'em, most notably in situations where you're trying to use them as active storage for running apps off 'em, they'll just be horridly slow.

Why not just get another small SSD and add that into the system instead of trying to make a jump to a larger SSD overall? And I don't mean throw another drive in there for RAID 0 stuff - I mean another SSD for apps/games/etc, the same reasons you were considering using SD cards

 

[Cyberdemon]

Sorry I should've clarified that this would be for a laptop.

Specifically I'm contemplating a Macbook Pro with the SSD partitioned in half for Win 7 (gaming) and OSX (work software/personal stuff).

Once I halve the storage it'll make it tough to keep a lot of those big apps installed. I could go the opti-bay route but since I already have a desk full of SD cards I was debating if it would be feasible. The use case being "Hey I want to play starcraft once this week, let me pop in the Starcraft SD".

 

[Joe Average]

Which is ok, just stop calling SD cards SSDs 'cause you're gonna confuse the hell out of other people fast.

As long as you can deal with the excessively slow load times and save times, hey, go for it. If you've got a bunch of SD cards laying around not doing much, make use of 'em I suppose. Once you set this into motion you'll figure out just how bad the performance is with SD cards used for actual application usage and then make a decision to continue it or find something a bit more "snappy" soon enough.

"desk full of SD cards..."

GIMME!

 

[Cyberdemon]

Sorry for the typo, Coffee hasn't kicked in yet. ;-)

I suppose this is an easy enough experiment to test...I'll try installing something on my desktop on a card and see how it handles it. If it's a complete failure than I'll avoid it. Most of this stuff would be for multi player anyways so writing to the disk wouldn't occur very often.