Asus blames 'thermal stress' for fried SD card readers in Ally handhelds The SD card reader on Asus's Steam Deck competitor is failing due to excessive heat, the manufacturer confirmed this week. "After confirmation from internal testing, under certain thermal stress conditions the SD card reader may malfunction" on the ROG Ally, a company representative wrote in a forum post. "To alleviate the …
Indeed, whilst it genuinely was some time ago that we were happily loading the latest and greatest games from cassette tape or even floppy disc, the realisation of *just* how big the latest and greatest have become these days *really* hammers home how far away those heady days of the home computer craze actually were...
GTA also has a 90-ish GB footprint these days, last time I checked some years ago... The original game had 60-ish GB, the difference has to be all the business, vehicles, and Cayo Perico, the single landmass added to the game.
Anyway, google could answer this one reasonably, on the other hand:
Steam Games With The Biggest File Size And How Many GB They Take
1 Ark: Survival Evolved - 400 GB.
2 Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare - 235 GB. ...
3 Borderlands 3: Director's Cut - 135 GB. ...
4 Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War - 175 GB. ...
5 Red Dead Redemption 2 - 120 GB. ...
6 Final Fantasy 15 Windows Edition - 110 GB. ...
I don't know about you, but I don't think I even have room to install Ark if I had it. And that list mention just Steam. Yes, Call of Duty has a bunch of modules that can be installed separately, this must be the whole thing.
SD card readers are not known for their longevity. I need to replace them regularly. I always assumed it was the repeated tugging out and wedging in of the cards. I'm surprised nobody sells an extender, so you would only have to change the extender rather than the unit, which may be built in or a proprietary design. I usually ignore built-in card readers and use a permanently attached USB/card reader.
Perhaps they should consider a novel approach and test a few production units before flogging them all to punters. It seems like a crazy idea, but it might just work.
SD card connectors have a limited number of mating cycles, but then it's made for the consumer market so not surviving long is hardly a problem (or even by design).
If you can use external card readers then try Compact Flash or CFast instead, more expensive but designed for industrial/rugged applications and much more durable. And when buying 2nd hand storage cards also not really expensive.
"SD card connectors have a limited number of mating cycles"
10,000 seems to be the norm for the sockets stocked by Farnell, which equates to roughly 3 cycles a day, every day, for 10 years. You'd have to be a pretty hardcore gamer to wear out the socket much faster than that, especially bearing in mind that, barring a few stupendously large games, or the use of stupidly small SD cards, you wouldn't necessarily need to be swapping cards every time you wanted to switch from one game to another.
Or, alternatively, the manufacturer of the console has gone a bit OTT in shaving pennies off the BOM cost and has specced a socket made of cheese, but that's a problem of their making, it's not one forced on them by having chosen to use SD cards.
The CF sockets also on offer are similarly rated for 10,000 cycles, so whilst there may be some ruggedised alternatives available, in terms of the stuff that's commercially available off the shelf, there's nothing to choose between the two formats here. And having suffered from bent pin syndrome on a CF reader due to its mechanical design being sufficiently imprecise such that as the card was fed into the connector it managed to become misaligned with the pins, I'll happily switch to SD cards and their generally more tolerant of insertion alignment variances - it's only my trusty old DSLR still soldiering on after 15 years which stops Chez Chris becoming a CF-free zone...
...SD card slot is located directly above the handheld's exhaust vents, and thus should benefit from increased airflow,
Yeah, hot airflow.
Oddly enough SD card slots don't seem to suffer from overheating in any other application, so I suspect that the problem may well be that this only happens if you're daft enough to install them in a hot air stream.
The SD card reader on my Latitude 7390 gets quite hot under sustained write and it's nowhere near the heatsink. I use an Endurance grade card as a kind of HDD in this machine, as it's a minimalist ultrabook style. The SD reader on this is wired to the PCIe bus, so is quite fast, and gets warm under heavy write load like torrenting. It hasn't crapped out yet.
I wonder if the heat from the Ally is melting solder somehow.....
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