Steam Deck designer warns in opposition to Do it yourself SSD upgrades

Why it matters: The Steam Deck is a good deal extra upgradeable/repairable than lots of fashionable products, and that's a superior point. Nonetheless, Valve nevertheless would not want you to crack open yours until you're nicely knowledgeable of the risks. The SSD, in distinct, may be a tempting update for lots of, but a good quality microSD card is just as superior and a great deal a lot less of a trouble in comparison.

Again in July 2021, we realized that Valve's Steam Deck has a user-replaceable inner SSD, and this was well been given by the gamer local community. Contemporary units are more and more hard to repair service (or upgrade) and businesses have been making an attempt every thing in their electricity to prevent customers from trying to do repairs by themselves, and that still holds genuine to this day.

Soon after ready several months for orders to ship, Steam Deck prospective buyers started off obtaining their handheld consoles and quickly observed some rough edges on an normally impressive to start with-era item. Some users started off enduring stick drift, so they tried repairs on their personal regardless of Valve's insistence on leaving any needed servicing to fix experts.

One more suffering issue of the Steam Deck is that it will come with an M.2 SSD in a one-sided 2230 variety issue, which is more compact than alternatives and also extra strength efficient. On the other hand, this sort of SSDs are notoriously challenging to uncover and generally pricier compared to, say, M.2 2280 and M.2 2242 products. Floor Professional 8 and Area Laptop 4 proprietors who would like to restore or enhance the storage ability of their units are acquainted with this conundrum.

Just lately, one Canadian Steam Deck operator decided to feel exterior the box and tried to cram an M.2 2242 SSD into the handheld. The process was successful, and the 512-gigabyte KingSpec PCIe 3. x2 SSD shortly started cruising through the installation of SteamOS at pace of around 400 megabytes per 2nd.

Nonetheless, this is not without having some caveats — the method necessitates going some cables and thermal pads out of the way to make home for the more time SSD module. Furthermore, 1 of Steam Deck's designers, Lawrence Yang, warned versus performing this mod as you run the possibility of shortening the lifespan of your handheld. Supposedly, the Steam Deck's power management circuitry could overheat as it was hardly ever intended to take care of the better load of an M.2 2230 SSD.

Upgrading the SSD on your Steam Deck may be tempting, but you can by now up grade the storage via a microSD card slot with small chance and respectable benefits. In point, reviewers observed no discernible change between working video games from the SSD compared to a excellent microSD card. The only enhancement will be in loading times, but even there you may well only see a variation of a couple of seconds, at ideal.