Can I Play Ark with a SD card ?

[saaron175]

I want to Play and Ark and have all of the DLC’s but I don’t have enough storage on my computer, If I Purchase a SD card will I still be able to play ?

[Scheneighnay]

No, the transfer speed on those is way too low.

[SylenThunder]

Not only is the transfer speeds for SD cards abhorrently slow, they get pretty expensive if you want something of decent quality.  

SSD's are the "bog standard" for games now. With many new games it is the minimum requirement. Your average 2.5" SATA SSD will achieve speeds of  500+ MB/s. A very fast SD Card is capable of less than half that at best (200MB/s), and your system would need to be capable of supporting the latest architecture. On average, most SD cards are only capable of 100MB/s, which is about the same as an archaic platter drive. And a lot of SD card makers are very loose in their advertising. Stating "lightning fast" speeds, but then you do some research on them and find that they are really only capable of doing marginally OK speeds. Sure it is fine for a digital camera. Not great for if you want to run games off of them.

For the cost of portable storage to increase your space enough for the game, you might as well just purchase another SSD to add to your system. Or if you don't have the ability to add another SSD, to replace the drives you have with a larger one. I have a laptop that has 500GB M.2 for the OS, and a 1TB platter drive for additional storage. A 2TB SSD is only $100, and comes with cloning software to copy my existing drive to it. In comparison, a 1TB SD card of quality good enough to maybe be half as fast as the 2TB SSD is $130. Half the size, and half the performance, for a bigger price.

And compare that to an external drive you just plug into USB. That seems like a great choice right?  Wrong. A top-tier Samsung will run you $100 for a 1TB Drive. (And honestly, 1TB is your bare minimum here for a usable device.) It uses NVMe technology, so you will bet better speeds than an SSD, but ONLY if your hardware can support it. In real life testing, your average is going to be 200-400MB/s unless you have a fully dedicated USB3.0 rail and are using a high-bandwidth USB cable. And back to performance/cost-per-dollar you are again better off upgrading your existing internals.

Do yourself a favor, and do a proper upgrade.

 

Edited April 10 by SylenThunder