I won’t say that anyone can do this if you don’t know how to do it in the first place. It however was realatively quick and easy. So let’s start from the beginning, I did talk about which storage hard drive cards would work with the Steam Deck, they call them NVME’s. I got mine off of Amazon and it works really well, I installed it in under 20 minutes. The problem I had was having to redownload all my Games. That took like 3 hours with it be connected to the dock, and that is no small feet. I play Elden Rings, Spider-Man Remaster, Halo, Subnautica, Subnautica Below Zero and also Half-Life series. Althought that was over 180 gigabytes, that is still really fast in my opinion, unlike downloading over wifi, connecting to a wired connection will always by my way to install games on the Steam Deck.
Some Caveats
Let’s talk about some of these small warnings. If you haven’t backed up anything on the SSD than you will most likely loose them. You can easily move files that you want to save to your sdcard, which also is very helpful in keeping backups. You’ll also want to make sure to remove the sdcard before you try to open up the Steam Deck, or you will break the Sdcard. I’ve done that at least one and it isn’t a fun experience buying a new one. You’ll also want to install the recovery disk onto a USB-C drive if all possible unless you have a dock and then you can use the dock to reinstall the Steam OS. The app that comes with installing the Steam OS didn’t require much from me other than making sure I knew it would delete all files on the NVME. It was a new one so I wasn’t worried about loosing any data. Also if you moved any files from the SDcard, unless I missed a step, you’ll most likely need to reformat the SD card to move files back to the SDcard. I honestly think I missed a step because I should of been able to verify my integratity of the files and not have to download all these big games back, it however didn’t cause me too much grief.
Some Take Away
Knowing that if I had to replace the SSD it wouldn’t be much problems. I did buy a 256gb NVME just because I found some for 30$ on amazon. You can however install 1tb or 2tb when they become more availabe and cheaper. It was way cheaper than buying a 512 on the Steam Deck website and I still can replace any part I might need to in the coming years. One day I’ll buy a newer model of the Steam Deck with better hardware or updated hardware. It however is going to be an interesting time to see what they come up with on the Steam Deck. I simply love it and even use it at a desktop whenever I need to. It will be a great international Travel accessorie instead of taking my laptop to browse the web or do what I might need to do on the go. I’m in the process of looking for a good Mouse and keyboard setup that might be small and portable so I can do what I might need to do on the go. Very Powerful and great little gaming device. Have you upgraded yoru Steam Deck yet, if so what did you do with yours more storage or change the display to a better dislpay? i’d like to hear what you might did to yours and let’s compare notes.
Not a techie, but thanks for elaborating on this post! It was helpful 🙂