PSA: Advice against using this or test with a small inexpensive card first

[brianx87]

I used the install guide to the letter and the installation failed at the end when returning to Steam Game Mode UI to format the card, now I have a 1TB Scandisk Extreme I paid £200 for that doesn't work and won't format in any form be it on Linux, Windows, using different software to do so.

[Trevo525]

Nothing about formatting a drive will mess it up. A file system is just the part that tells the drive where to layout files and how to find them. That sounds like a bad microSD card, I have heard of some bad drives being sold from Amazon. Did you test the drive elsewhere before you tried formatting with btrfs?

[brianx87]

Card is brand new and was working fine on the Deck before I tried BtrfsDeck and I didn't buy it from Amazon, it's not a fake either as it comes with Scandisk Recovery Pro license, I had previously used it as formatted by the Deck as ext4 and tried formatting it as Btrf on the desktop mode but the card had to be reformatted in gaming mode to be properly seen and mounted.

EDIT: Card is now corrupted according to various software and devices I've tested it on

[antgly]

Is there any reason to believe that any of these issues could be causing this? I'm on my third MicroSD card and I have my suspicions as to what it could be.

• MicroSD card poor quality control
• The Steam Deck is overstressing the MicroSD card in some way on some/all OS versions. This would explain why my previous MicroSD card - PNY 256 GB MicroSD U3 A2 is lagging even after format.
• Running low on storage space on the MicroSD card is adding some sort of stress on the card
• The MicroSD card is somehow affected by the Steam Deck's TDP Limiter due to power fluctuations.

How much of this is Steam Deck specific is up for debate, but I hope it gets sorted out.

[Trevo525]

I searched for "microsd" on the Steam Deck subreddit and found that there is a known issue (1) (2) that some devices have overheated, causing damage. I also found a topic on the Steam Deck forums. It is possible that this has happened I guess. I have 6 microSD cards in various sizes all formatted in btrfs with this repo. Two of which (this one and this one) are 1TB drives with both being 80% full. Also, important to note is that not all of them are brand new. I have one that I've used in a Raspberry Pi 24/7 for a few years.

I would say that it is highly unlikely that btrfs had anything to do with these drives faults. But, if you can't format with KDE partition manager, all that I can say, is you will probably have to replace the cards.