I got mine open box for like 300, I decided to upgrade to a 1TB SSD and completely disregarded the existence of the SD card reader due to the issues this hardware has. On the other hand the same SD Card was for over a year on my old LCD Steam Deck and is currently on my OLED Steam Deck since release. Zero issues.
I'm glad that's been your experience, but unfortunately, I've had two ROG Ally's that have had SD card readers fail on me, even running at custom 30W TDP profiles that only boost to 36W at the P2 profile and being updated on the latest BIOS that was intended to keep thermals under control on both devices. I currently have a R6 version that is going strong so far and I've been using the SD card reader just for Switch and other emulator game backups and it's not had any issues so far (coming up on almost two weeks with this device). On the subreddit for the ROG Ally, you also see my case isn't a one off and many have had SD card issues when they've used it, especially when running the Ally at the default Turbo 30W power profile.
My SD-Card reader stopped working after a Windows update. Not even a Driver update but literally a Windows update. Plugging in an external SD-Card reader i can see that my SD-Card still works and after using cloud-recovery my SD-Card shows up and works fine, but after updating Windows it stopped again. SD-Card reader also works fine in Linux.
If as the rumours said the SD was getting too hot then by constantly changing SD cards you actually made it easier for them to survive since none of them stays in there too long of a time getting the constant heat.
Personally, I think the SD cards should be able to handle this. I had a one terabyte microSD card in my switch, so I’ll be transferring to my new steam deck and it’s been handling all these large games quite nicely on my steam deck. It’s mainly gonna be used this store, my smaller and more intermediate games like finding of Isaac, my larger games and like newer stuff I’ll keep on the internal SSD but for a good amount of my library which consists a smaller games or older ones. Those are gonna go on the microSD card. It seemed to run just fine on the switch so I don’t see why it would cause a problem on the steam deck.
You're super late on this. This has been resolved since July lol it was a bad soldering job for the card reader controller that would break due to thermal stress because it wasn't thick enough. I got mine back at the end of July and it's been working since.
so there is a new Ver of rog ally without this problem? i think ASUS said they cant fix this problem and the only way that you can fix this problem is that you send your device to ASUS for the repair and they fix it for you. i think i wait for rog ally 2 😄
I'm using a spare 64gb SanDisk ultra which I had in my OnePlus pad since one month now. Works perfectly fine on my Ally...just ordered a 128gb sandisk ultra.....to be on the safe side incase anything happens I don't loose much. But the 64gb works just fine.
Do you have any update after 4 months? I'm trying to get a second hand ally but I'm worried for SD card reader to have problems because where i live, I don't have the option to do a RMA
Good point! I got mine (z1 extreme) open box in pretty much brand new condition, revision 6. Havent had any issues. granted im not playing any AAA modern graphically intensive games on it, esp not off the SD. Mainly emulators. Ps1/2, n64,saturn,gamecube. All off the SD.
If you read on, read it and you investigate this issue. It is not the SD card but the motherboard and card slot that is the problem. I think they rectified this one. Most of them on the newer generations
It's a combination of problems: bad soldering on pptc fuse used to protect SD card reader from overcurrent plus bad heat dissipation by Ally. People literally replacing this fuse with a copper wire and sd card slot starts to work again
Had a launch-day Ally and went through 4 of the 512 evo's and 1 tb Sandisk, all fried. This has not been the issue on any other device I have ever owned. Other than the SD Card slot cooking cards, I do feel the ROG Ally is a pretty slick device and enjoyed my time with it.
so you are lucky, because device to device there is a difference. mine has the SD card issue and destroyed two of my SD cards but my friend device is fine from the start with no SD card problem. so i think some device don't have this problem from the start.
I mean when did you buy it? That's mostly an issue with the earlier models. Me and my friend had allys from launch and they both fried the sd reader. The cards were fine though.
Didn't really care about the sd card until I tried to transfer stuff from my laptop to my ally. It made it almost impossible to do it. I have to literally download the files to my phone and then wire my ally to my phone. It's frustrating
You over saucing it bro. I have an ally and agree that the issue is supposedly fixed but 😬. Going as far as to say it’s better than the steamdeck and switch is crazy
Well then i got a really faulty one from january 24. If I Play from the SD Card (Samsung) i Allways get a corruption Error from Steam and the Game closes. On my Switch i can Play with No Problem fram that SD card
@@marios.2975 30W (Available only while charging), custom fan RPM with turbo this and that. RGB customization. And higher resolution and refresh rate I bet you get many, many hours of playtime on that handheld, which was designed for portability. Such a competent handheld with superb power efficiency. Totally doesn't neglect the battery in favor of 'muh power', making it a useless handheld and rendering it as nothing more than a subpar Mini PC with a battery shoved up its arse, unlike erry other PC handheld ever from the past decade
My sister and I made the stupid mistake of buying the Steam Deck on first release, yep bad idea. I managed to get a replacement model my sister still has hers and ot doesn't play games anymore. (Mine had a problem with the SD card too, but thankfully it still works, got a 1tb in both my Switch and Steam Deck) Same problem with the PS3 on release. Guess we'll never learn 😂 I put this off because of its price, but I think I'll get one now it's been out a while at least it can play Dragon's Dogma 2 unlike the stupid Deck what can't play much.
prefer ally with a broken sd card then another brand that's sucks at optimisations, after all it's not that hard to put a 1 or 2tb ssd in it , sd cards are crap anyway and don't belong in a pc
@@SimoneGianpi who said it's justified, mine still works but i didn't use it more than 20min for moving some files, 99% of people complain about this when they know that sd cards are not that reliable in pc handhelds anyway but they continue to use it until they break and come to complain that sd cards it's not reading or stuck , sd card it's shorten it's lifetime by very very much due to extreme use scenarios like pc games that have very tiny files and definitely a lot more than switch, every tech must be used for what it's purpose not for something else that will shorten it's lifetime , so ally + false using sd card results in cash loss for all 🤑 and definitely company loove this
Oh man I had the Silicon power 1tb sd card for a day. Sent it back to Amazon almost immediately. What a POS. Im using the Sabrent rocket 1tb sd card now and it kicks ass. Dont fool yourself though. NO mocrosd card can come close to the performance of even the most JANK 2230 ssd. By orders of magnitude.
THIS. I got a 2TB WD SN740 (same model that comes with the Ally just larger) and it's great. I don't understand what these guys are doing running games off the SD cards to begin with. Micro SD cards are not meant to be used like that, their data bus ussually tops out at 80-100mb a second. You use the SD cards to transfer files not to run the games off of. a 2TB SSD can hold like 50 full games, just rotate your game library when your done with games onto the SSD and you'll have a much better experience.
Had my Ally since launch, never used my sd card slot once. It can die and fry for all I care. Oddly, my fingerprint reader is dead or dying. Still don't care about it, blasted thing only worked 33% of the time at best.
Okay but why you buying trash SD cards that are 256 and 512? Why not buy 1 TB like most users and see how they do? Using low capacity SD cards proves nothing. Put a 2 Gig in there run it 10 hours at 30 watts and then I’ll say okay they won’t catch fire. 😂
Because it’s cheaper and less risk? I already ran a 1tb in the Ally for over 10 hours at 30 watts. Only thing I pointed out was how the silicone power sd card turned out to be faulty. I ordered 4 almost at once. Soo yeah
IDK. Nintendo makes the best consoles on the market. The "PS Portal" is a very bad/useless device that no one asked for Maybe Sony can make the normiestation relevant again by making a PSP2?
@cqllel5186 someone is butthurt that sony didn't give up on the handheld market by making a ps portal. Stay triggered that it lives rent free in your head Chris Toro fanboy duck sucker hahahaha 🤣
I got mine open box for like 300, I decided to upgrade to a 1TB SSD and completely disregarded the existence of the SD card reader due to the issues this hardware has. On the other hand the same SD Card was for over a year on my old LCD Steam Deck and is currently on my OLED Steam Deck since release. Zero issues.
You better than me. Too me that's unacceptable. I pay money for a product I expect it to work properly.
I don't trust open box, is it really safe
I'm glad that's been your experience, but unfortunately, I've had two ROG Ally's that have had SD card readers fail on me, even running at custom 30W TDP profiles that only boost to 36W at the P2 profile and being updated on the latest BIOS that was intended to keep thermals under control on both devices. I currently have a R6 version that is going strong so far and I've been using the SD card reader just for Switch and other emulator game backups and it's not had any issues so far (coming up on almost two weeks with this device). On the subreddit for the ROG Ally, you also see my case isn't a one off and many have had SD card issues when they've used it, especially when running the Ally at the default Turbo 30W power profile.
did u send the ROG in for RMA?
My SD-Card reader stopped working after a Windows update. Not even a Driver update but literally a Windows update. Plugging in an external SD-Card reader i can see that my SD-Card still works and after using cloud-recovery my SD-Card shows up and works fine, but after updating Windows it stopped again. SD-Card reader also works fine in Linux.
Same as mine
If as the rumours said the SD was getting too hot then by constantly changing SD cards you actually made it easier for them to survive since none of them stays in there too long of a time getting the constant heat.
Personally, I think the SD cards should be able to handle this. I had a one terabyte microSD card in my switch, so I’ll be transferring to my new steam deck and it’s been handling all these large games quite nicely on my steam deck. It’s mainly gonna be used this store, my smaller and more intermediate games like finding of Isaac, my larger games and like newer stuff I’ll keep on the internal SSD but for a good amount of my library which consists a smaller games or older ones. Those are gonna go on the microSD card. It seemed to run just fine on the switch so I don’t see why it would cause a problem on the steam deck.
You're super late on this. This has been resolved since July lol it was a bad soldering job for the card reader controller that would break due to thermal stress because it wasn't thick enough. I got mine back at the end of July and it's been working since.
so there is a new Ver of rog ally without this problem? i think ASUS said they cant fix this problem and the only way that you can fix this problem is that you send your device to ASUS for the repair and they fix it for you. i think i wait for rog ally 2 😄
@@brokensword2621 there is no new version just better manufacturing process to prevent weak solder joints
I'm using a spare 64gb SanDisk ultra which I had in my OnePlus pad since one month now. Works perfectly fine on my Ally...just ordered a 128gb sandisk ultra.....to be on the safe side incase anything happens I don't loose much. But the 64gb works just fine.
@MichaelLiao I got my ally January this year is it woth picking up an sd card?
Do you have any update after 4 months? I'm trying to get a second hand ally but I'm worried for SD card reader to have problems because where i live, I don't have the option to do a RMA
I’m starting to think all the open box models available at best buy are from Asus fixing the issue with the sd cars slot vs doing a recall.
Good point! I got mine (z1 extreme) open box in pretty much brand new condition, revision 6. Havent had any issues. granted im not playing any AAA modern graphically intensive games on it, esp not off the SD. Mainly emulators. Ps1/2, n64,saturn,gamecube. All off the SD.
If you read on, read it and you investigate this issue. It is not the SD card but the motherboard and card slot that is the problem. I think they rectified this one. Most of them on the newer generations
It's a soldering issue on the men card reader controller chip.
Depends there people who reported their SD card was corrupted and never recovered.
It's a combination of problems: bad soldering on pptc fuse used to protect SD card reader from overcurrent plus bad heat dissipation by Ally. People literally replacing this fuse with a copper wire and sd card slot starts to work again
Had a launch-day Ally and went through 4 of the 512 evo's and 1 tb Sandisk, all fried. This has not been the issue on any other device I have ever owned. Other than the SD Card slot cooking cards, I do feel the ROG Ally is a pretty slick device and enjoyed my time with it.
use a micro reader to take heat off the sd card
if it overheats. even the battery can go bad and wont take a charge. I ran my aya neo air at 20 watts tdp. Fried my battery.
own a rog ally manufactured in 08/23 and it runs sd cards fine since day 1, have a sandisk extreme it's a great memory card
How do games run on it?
J’espère que pour toi la carte va durer
I just got mine back from RMA for the slot. The SD card corrupted, but a reformat and the card was fine on my PC. Maybe I got a bad egg
so you are lucky, because device to device there is a difference. mine has the SD card issue and destroyed two of my SD cards but my friend device is fine from the start with no SD card problem. so i think some device don't have this problem from the start.
I mean when did you buy it? That's mostly an issue with the earlier models. Me and my friend had allys from launch and they both fried the sd reader. The cards were fine though.
That’s true but sometimes the earlier models are sold, which are faulty. One of the SP team members told me. So you can quote them.
What model that affected?
I got one that manufactured in 23 september.
Didn't really care about the sd card until I tried to transfer stuff from my laptop to my ally. It made it almost impossible to do it. I have to literally download the files to my phone and then wire my ally to my phone. It's frustrating
Are you for real?? It's called a USB C dongle!! Pretty much every laptop has a USB C slot! Why on earth would you need to use a micro SD card??
You over saucing it bro. I have an ally and agree that the issue is supposedly fixed but 😬. Going as far as to say it’s better than the steamdeck and switch is crazy
Well, he is a guy that owns an Alienware laptop so....
Never played any games in 30 watts and my SD slot worked for like 5 minutes and then it won't recognize any
Well then i got a really faulty one from january 24.
If I Play from the SD Card (Samsung) i Allways get a corruption Error from Steam and the Game closes. On my Switch i can Play with No Problem fram that SD card
I also had Steam Deck destroy an SD card and it was a 1TB one but it still shows up in the device manager on a PC so I might be able to save it.
You spend 10 hours every two days with 24 cards? 240/48 = magic
So the loafing times aren’t as bad as people make em out to be?
I just got mine back a few weeks ago from RMA and the sd card reader had been working fine.
Who is rma?
The handheld that not only can't sustain itself, but damages itself
Not the point of the video adhd
Haters are gonna hate you know that probably better than me. Love my Ally. No SD card issues in months.
Btw, I ONLY play 30W mode. Daily, for hours.
Maybe 🤔 I should add I run only custom FAN profiles that are little higher RPMs / cooler than Turbo Mode.
@@marios.2975 30W (Available only while charging), custom fan RPM with turbo this and that. RGB customization. And higher resolution and refresh rate
I bet you get many, many hours of playtime on that handheld, which was designed for portability. Such a competent handheld with superb power efficiency. Totally doesn't neglect the battery in favor of 'muh power', making it a useless handheld and rendering it as nothing more than a subpar Mini PC with a battery shoved up its arse, unlike erry other PC handheld ever from the past decade
i tried 5 sd card , none worked on ally :(
My sister and I made the stupid mistake of buying the Steam Deck on first release, yep bad idea. I managed to get a replacement model my sister still has hers and ot doesn't play games anymore. (Mine had a problem with the SD card too, but thankfully it still works, got a 1tb in both my Switch and Steam Deck) Same problem with the PS3 on release. Guess we'll never learn 😂 I put this off because of its price, but I think I'll get one now it's been out a while at least it can play Dragon's Dogma 2 unlike the stupid Deck what can't play much.
I had the Samsung and it F’ed up my card. Just had another one screw up. Sandisk
I don't have any issues w the sd card reader
Did ally x will had this problem, this made the device not better than( game boy advance ) even
Hey, what is your Ally model, is it the R8?
Mine is R6 and no issues so far. Granted i got mine open box so it could have been sent in to fix the issue
How to check the model of ally
@@josephvierneza673Go look at the box and check the serial number . The number right after the “R” is specified as the month your device being made
prefer ally with a broken sd card then another brand that's sucks at optimisations, after all it's not that hard to put a 1 or 2tb ssd in it , sd cards are crap anyway and don't belong in a pc
This doesn't justify having a SD card reader that breaks itself
@@SimoneGianpi who said it's justified, mine still works but i didn't use it more than 20min for moving some files, 99% of people complain about this when they know that sd cards are not that reliable in pc handhelds anyway but they continue to use it until they break and come to complain that sd cards it's not reading or stuck , sd card it's shorten it's lifetime by very very much due to extreme use scenarios like pc games that have very tiny files and definitely a lot more than switch, every tech must be used for what it's purpose not for something else that will shorten it's lifetime , so ally + false using sd card results in cash loss for all 🤑 and definitely company loove this
@@cristianJoker2512
Why not just use a USB C dongle to move files??
@@ZeePirateMan i know about dongles but i hate the ideea , i just upgraded to 2tb sdd and it's plenty for me
Oh man I had the Silicon power 1tb sd card for a day. Sent it back to Amazon almost immediately. What a POS. Im using the Sabrent rocket 1tb sd card now and it kicks ass. Dont fool yourself though. NO mocrosd card can come close to the performance of even the most JANK 2230 ssd. By orders of magnitude.
Got a 1tb silcon power sd card but use it in my Switch. No problems what so ever, may you got unlocky?
I got the A2 variant fyi.
THIS. I got a 2TB WD SN740 (same model that comes with the Ally just larger) and it's great. I don't understand what these guys are doing running games off the SD cards to begin with. Micro SD cards are not meant to be used like that, their data bus ussually tops out at 80-100mb a second. You use the SD cards to transfer files not to run the games off of. a 2TB SSD can hold like 50 full games, just rotate your game library when your done with games onto the SSD and you'll have a much better experience.
Got couple of them in 128gb works flawlessly and they are a reputable company
Samsung 512 pro SD card still working, knock on wood.
mine is currently @ asus for a bad sd card reader
no sd card failure here.
Mine was fixed then couple months later same problem again
Had my Ally since launch, never used my sd card slot once. It can die and fry for all I care.
Oddly, my fingerprint reader is dead or dying. Still don't care about it, blasted thing only worked 33% of the time at best.
Ya I dont use that janky FP reader either. Worked maybe half the time, turned it off. wtf do you need that for anyways...
Okay but why you buying trash SD cards that are 256 and 512? Why not buy 1 TB like most users and see how they do? Using low capacity SD cards proves nothing. Put a 2 Gig in there run it 10 hours at 30 watts and then I’ll say okay they won’t catch fire. 😂
Because it’s cheaper and less risk? I already ran a 1tb in the Ally for over 10 hours at 30 watts. Only thing I pointed out was how the silicone power sd card turned out to be faulty. I ordered 4 almost at once. Soo yeah
Playstation portal is better than switch and switch 2 hahahaha
I wouldn't call it that because you have to have a PlayStation. Just the Logitech cloud streamer
IDK. Nintendo makes the best consoles on the market. The "PS Portal" is a very bad/useless device that no one asked for
Maybe Sony can make the normiestation relevant again by making a PSP2?
@cqllel5186 someone is butthurt that sony didn't give up on the handheld market by making a ps portal. Stay triggered that it lives rent free in your head Chris Toro fanboy duck sucker hahahaha 🤣
@@cqllel5186 Nintendo switch is garbage next to the failed wii u Nintendrone hahaha
@@ToGrimmToWin Hahaha ps portal lives rent free in your head Nintendo switch fanboy 😂