long ago i posted a topic about booting from a SD
but their are some major problems it face for example SD are Simple memory chips it kind of get corrupt easy
the maxium amount of times i can boot from a SD was 3 times with a linux system

now i read the Steamdeck works and boots from a SD chip?
my thoughts, HOW?

Only cheapest (64GB) version uses eMMC memory. Some budget laptops, smartphones and many other devices with embedded systems use this kind of storage for years and I don't think they die after 3 boots. All cards I own also work even though some of them are about 10 years old (not used for live systems though).

That makes no sense. Unless you're using faulty SD cards, how would they simply "get corrupt"? All flash memory (SD cards, SSDs, USB flash drives, etc.) have finite program/erase cycles, but on modern storage media it's such a large number that it would take the average user quite a few years before that is reached.

In my own experience as a photographer, I use lots of SD cards and I've never had any issues with them.

they get corrupt because they can't trim that's why they are simple SD cards any operation system write and read tons of times that's what brakes the OS system beyond boot state.

and no SSD and NVme have special controllers so they not get corrupt easy


i have tested it my self 2 years ago with a SD card reader and SD cards after 3 boots of any OS it's brakes simple.
that's why i find the steam deck weird it boots from normal SD (which after reading the specs i see it boots from a 256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)

Youtube channels are full of shit basicly i should learn not to trust it so much without drawing my own conclusions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsUuSBwpHOk

magic

You can't trim external SD but embedded ones (eMMC) support trim just fine. Smartphones use this type of storage since beginning and boots hundreds/thousands times in lifespan, how often do you hear smartphone died because of memory failure?

SD cards use erase or discard operations which function similarly to a trim command.

embedded SD or memory ain't that interesting, things become interesting if it's swapable
but we can't have nice things in life not even that :(

Something on par with 300,000 times... I haven't looked it up in a while.

Faulty, fake cards were a huge problem just a few years ago. Great '8Gb deals' which were 2Gb under the hood with the chip tweaked so it reads it's a bigger card. Slapped with an official 'sony' logo.

There's probably tons more 3rd shift cards out there, which are cheap but don't perform quite up to standards, probably slower. Using linux you have to enable said options and the filesystem and/or hardware has to support it. Say for a ramdrive it would free the memory or zeroize it, for a filesystem it might do something else.

Hmmmm.... Which distro? What was the filesystem of the SD?
Personally i've had no issues on a 64Gb SD card using Slax; the core OS runs via .sb bundles.

As for the courruption, i've heard SD cards will cycle around which sectors are used to try and use them evenly (somehow) to extend the life, and at each boot the filesystem sector will have a bit changed saying if it was mounted or dismounted cleanly (Telling you if it's a dirty partition and if repairs are needed). You might try a live Distro or something, or have it say Fat32 for certain portions of the OS, and you might edit the fstab file and have it disable trimming (if enabled, or enabling if it isn't).

In the end though i'm going to guess the SD card may be the issue. If you can do a test and check on it that all of the space is real.

From the video posted here that shows the Steam Deck disassemby, the narrator states that ALL models support NVME and are upgradable.

Regarding boot from EMMC/SD Card, I've seen devices become extremely slow, if I correct remember the worst case was a cheap blue Acer convertible that took 10+ minutes to boot Win10. That said, Steam Deck operating system is not Windows 10 that do constantly I/O operations and well designed devices will use better memory.

Case in point, my old 2Gb Surface 3 (not the pro model wich uses Sata SSD) has booted from EMMC every single day in a friends shop for 5 years with constant usage and still "going strong". Note that this is the 2GB Ram model, wich constantly writes a lot of files to the Swap/Page File due the very limited Ram for modern browsing.
The Raspberry pi 3 in 24/7 duty and has been rebooted every day in the last couple of years, from SD card.

Edit: Fixing typos and youtube link to the Valve Deck teardown

Linux Mint, the native Filesystem (Ext) and FreeBSD

Ext? Ext2? Ext3? Ext4?

I'll assume Ext4, Ext3 and up allow Journaling i believe.

What's the mount layout? Does /boot get it's own partition? ( check with mount or fstab )

Usually Boot gets it's own partition in older systems because of issues with BIOS and accessing the first N megs during boot, so the boot partition ensures everything you need to boot is within that window.

i used the basic installing instructions thats the that one do with installed on the SSD

so thats
/Boot
/Temp
all the other stuff the distro use

the point is to make it swampable or it's useless
the whole point is having a mobile OS on the system not one that's not Swampable like people have no.

ofcourse i have fix that problem few months back with External SSD drives but they are bit larger and less compact
https://www.alternate.nl/ADATA/SD700-256-GB-externe-SSD/html/product/1334762

those things i using now they work like a charm but they not as cool like a SD card in a reader

Maybe use a USB stick instead of an SD card ?. Almost as portable as an SD card and definitely smaller than a portable SSD...