 Now back in the days of serial ATA gen 2, when we were booting dinosaur operating systems like Windows 7, a typical high-performance SSD would be rated somewhere in the neighborhood of around 230 to 250 megabytes a second for reads and writes. Which got me thinking, when Sony released SD cards that are rated up to 300 megabytes a second, okay technically 299 on the writes, could we boot Windows from these? And what would the experience be like? iFixit's ProTech Toolkit gives you the tools you need to tackle any electronics repair challenge. Visit ifixit.com slash Linus at the link below and get yours today. So these puppies have actually been out for quite a while, but it took Sony almost a year to send them to us because apparently, they and along with anything else made of NAND flash memory have been in very very short supply. So what's special about them is not really the capacity, I mean 128 gigs should be noted is pretty decent for an SSD from, you know, back when these kinds of speeds would have been reasonable, but it's not that. It's that because these are SDXC2, so these are UHS2 cards and high-end ones at that, you've actually got additional contact pins on the back of them that enable these extra speeds. Now what that means is that while they are backwards compatible with devices and with card readers, that are only SDXC capable to get the most out of it, we are going to need a special reader. So this is the, uh, the, wow, that's a terrible product name. I mean, I guess it's descriptive. This is the Sony UHS2 compatible high speed. Doesn't explicitly say it's an SD card reader, but whatever, minor details. So it's USB 3 and it's got a compatible slot back there for all those extra pins. Now the reason we need this is that while SD to SATA adapters, which, you know, would allow us to plug this into a SATA port, do actually exist. In fact, we covered a particularly abominable one of them a little while ago on this channel. Takes 10 micro SDs and then gives you one SATA interface. These products, because they're pretty stupid, haven't been updated in a long time, which means they're using very outdated controllers. In fact, this is only running SATA one speeds and that was the least of its problems in terms of performance. So we actually need that reader in order to plug our card into the system at all. We're also going to need this Windows installed USB. All right, so there's our install drive. Looks like, oh, there we go. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Forgot about this. So you can install Windows to a USB device. I was actually a little bit worried there that we just, it wasn't going to show up at all, but you need a special type of Windows installation. You can't just do it by putting a USB install disk in the system and installing it to it. It doesn't like that. So what we have to do is we have to create what's called a Windows to go installation. Now I've never successfully gotten that to work before. So yeah, so we're going to use a utility called Rufus. We're going to grab a Windows 10 image that we downloaded from Microsoft, and then we just need to point it at our USB drive and create a bootable disk. It's supposed to just be right here. So Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, stopped allowing you to create a Windows to go installer using the, not the ISO, but the like Windows media creation tool version. So what you have to do is actually find a disk. So fortunately, I actually just, when I was doing an audit of our software around here, I just realized some of our Windows installs were not 100% correctly legit. So I just like ran out and bought a bunch of them. So otherwise I wouldn't have a genuine Windows 10 disk, because otherwise we've done everything digitally. But what you need to have is an actual disk, and you have to create an ISO from that. So that's what we're going to have to do here. We're going to have to go back in time. And rip this disk. Okay, so we've got a Windows 10 image that theoretically should work now. Your target drive doesn't have the fixed. Oh, what the hell are we doing? No, we don't want to use this. Shoot. We need this. Okay, hold on. Uh, no. There we go. No label 128 gig. Okay, hopefully this won't give us any errors. Oh, that doesn't bode well. I think we're going to have to get some lunch or something. I'm really hungry, actually. Here we are. So that did take a fair bit longer than usual, but by all appearances, this is the first device. By all appearances, this is like pretty normal Windows stuff. C drive, Sony MRW S1 USB device. Cool. All right, so let's do some stuff then. Oh, okay. I'm feeling a little bit of lag. Wow, actually, hold on a second. Like you see anything measured in milliseconds, you go, it's probably pretty small. But 9,000 milliseconds is nine seconds of average response time. The main reason that we use SSD controllers and not SD cards is not the read and write speeds because those are sequential. I mean, the USB interface is part of the problem because compared to SATA or PCI Express NVMe, it's much less optimized for random performance. But the other issue is that an SD card is a relatively simple device. It's just a little bit of NAND flash and there's not really, to my knowledge, really any logic on it. Compared to an SSD, which has like this complex controller, in a lot of cases have like a DRAM cache, and then it has many NAND flash dies on it and then it can read from and write to them, sometimes all at once in a very strategic manner so that it can optimize performance and endurance. But even if it's not that bad, I actually wouldn't recommend this as a daily driver system because you would kill your SD card probably very quickly. It's like even though this SD card can do 300 megabytes a second reads and writes, you can see we're at 99% usage at like one megasecond total. And that's because it is not optimized. Oh, come on. Bear in mind, of course, that this is all on an 8-core Extreme Edition processor. Oh, 10-core, 10-core, excuse me. It's interesting that even when it's basically not doing anything, 0 to 1 megabyte a second, it still registers as being 100% active with average response times in the 3 to 4 megabytes to 3 to 5 seconds range. So we should get some drivers. So we need a goal for ourselves. We've got Windows running off an SD card, but how normal is this experience? Can we game off it? We need to get a game going and Steam is still updating though. I think this might actually be worse than running a mechanical drive. It's writing at a whopping 500 kilobytes per second. So it's clearly not doing a whole heck of a lot. No. The graphics driver is not compatible with this version of Windows. How does it even know the difference? That's stupid. Like looking at this, there's no, there's no discernible difference here. It's just Windows. So maybe it's just that we need a bazillion updates, which might be part of what it's been doing in the background here. It's got 79% of them downloaded. It's making everything so slow. I really need Steam to finish though. A full day, a full day. It took over a full day for all of those Windows updates to run. Utterly ridiculous. What we're doing now is with everything updated, the game installed, I haven't tried it yet, we're going to find out how bad or good is the experience. This is it. Okay, we're in. So the first thing that's noticeable, other than that Razer's gaming software managed to prompt me to install it itself, is that our display is scaling correctly. This is great. So as long as, oh, no Nvidia control panel though. That's weird. But this is showing up. Okay, I really thought this was going to be a lot better without stuff running in the background. Like it's measuring it in bytes per second. Half a megabyte a second. As far as I can tell, it looks like we are ready to go to run a game. So I installed Doom, which means that my drive, which is going to be running on the same device as my computer, installed Doom, which means that my drive is actually almost totally full. Like, isn't that trippy? Opening up this PC and there's no drive, there's just USB. I just don't know how long it's going to take to launch. That's not bad. Okay, I haven't played a ton of Doom, but like that seemed like a very serviceable load time. What do I do with this? Oh, we had a hitch there. Hitch. Those hitches might have actually been anomalies. This is not bad. Not bad. I am impressed. Where'd he go? Where'd he go? Get over it. Okay. Leg. Leg. Honestly, this experience is way better than I expected. You know, I think the issues before with the little bit of leg might have just been anomalies because this is really smooth. It's not bad at all. I mean, the game is called Doom, so, you know. I think we have our answer. So, can you do it? The answer is yes. So, yeah, it's a pretty crap experience to boot off of all things considered, but it's not designed for that kind of use, and they're blazing fast for just straight reads and straight writes, and I still think it's impressive that it works at all. I mean, the fact that you can run Windows off of something this big, and it's usable, not to mention that like, okay, compared to when I got into PCs, the capacity is actually similar to what you might have gotten out of something like a Mac Store or Diamond Max 9. Like, the hard drive I got for my first self-built computer was 120 gigs, and that is freaking incredible because I like to tell myself that that wasn't that long ago. 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