Tag: Clonezilla

So you want to upgrade your SSD on the Steam Deck, huh?

Paul2 Replies
The Prices of Steam Deck

Upgrading is Possible

I’m not going to say it won’t be easy to do. It just depends on how much of knowledge you have to do this. I bought the 64gb Model because well it was the cheaper of the 3. I figured it would be cheaper to do it myself than to pay them to do it. I am looking now and think I did a great job with this because I didn’t have to spend the 600 dollars for the 512gb model. In fact there are more bigger kinds of the SSD that I can install that will go beyond the 512gb that they are selling. If you want to do this, I really suggest checking out the Steam Deck Teardown that the IFIXIT guys did. I simply love the idea of tearing it down and being able to MOD it, if I so choice.  I’m going to talk about the best choices you have to upgrade your storage in the Steam Deck.   These are just my recommendations on which ones will help you and save you money in the process.

Buy NVME 2230 30 mm SSDs

So we start to talk about the kind of SSD’s you will need to buy in order to upgrade your Steam Deck.   You will need to find SSDs that are one sided NVME.  They can not have chips on both sides of the card, there would be no room for it.   You’re going to look for the type you might want but here are some good options that I see on Amazon.

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SkHynix 256GB PCIe NVMe 2230 SSD for 31$

Here’s the first one that I recommend for anyone who might just want to upgrade to a little bit bigger size. This however will not give you as much room as you might want but it will give you enough room to start off with and then you can SD cards to do the rest.  As you can see this one will be a good deal for you right now.   You can quickly and easily upgrade your Steam Deck to a bigger storage.   It however isn’t the only one I would recommend.

Micron SSD 512GB M.2 2230 30mm NVMe PCIe 4.0 for 99$

Now here’s a great deal going from jusst paying 399$ pluss tax to 499$ Plus tax.  Saving you over 130$, if you just did it yourself.   So this one should fit Steam Deck and I don’t see any problems with it.  It is small enough and fast enough to use with the Steam Deck.  You won’t see it slowing you down as you are gaming on the Steam Deck.

SN530 m.2 2230 SSD 1TB NVMe PCIe For 184$

This seems to be the best deal around because you can get almost a 1 tb for the best amount of money.   The only problem with this one is you really only get 866gb of space and the rest is taken up by design of the chip.   I don’t know if you want that or not but at least this one is available to you to buy.  You might be able to find other 1tb that will get closer to the 1tb limit but not  many and they start to get more expensive.

2TB M.2 2230 NVMe PCIe SSD Gen 4.0 for 539$

Finally we get to this bad boy, it is a bit expensive for my tastes but at least this is a Samsungs SSD.  So it will be blazing fast but I don’t know if I would pay 500$ for a 2tb when you can easy get Micro SD’s for cheaper.  I guess those who can afford to pay it will most likely.  I am sure there will be other manufacturers who will come out with 2tb but for right now this one is the only one on Amazon and claims to be able to upgrade the Steam Deck.  I suspect your will only get like 1.7tb of space off this SSD but it will be massive.  If you have a lot of games, this would definately let you put them on the Steam Deck.

Installing the Steam OS

So you bought a bigger SSd and went to install it but you will need to install the Steam OS.  You can follower the instructions on how to create a Steam OS recovery USB drive.   I personally might go with my own and use CloneZilla and clone the hard drive and move it to the new one after you install the new SSD.   Then grab something like Gparted and expand the disk to the size you need that would be my recommendations so you don’t loose any of you games or have to reinstall the games that you have already installed.   You will need a USB stick that has the size you want to clone so if you have a 64gb then you will need one that is at least that big.  You can use a dock or something like that, See my previous post about Docks.  to use multiple USB sticks.  Hope this helps.  Did you find this informative, why not share it and let others know that it is possible to upgrade your Steam Deck.

5 portable Apps that will save your time on your computer!

Paul
Picture by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

Give it a chance

So you have a client who has some computer problems, and you don’t know what to do?  I am here to help you with that problem.  It can’t be easy for some to know exactly what you might need for those uncertain times.   There are multitude of problems that you’ll see in your computer technician job that will need to be resolved.   Here is a little bit of a list of apps that I use on a daily or weekly process to repair and upgrade systems.  Some of these will help me fix problems or even problem solve the answer.

Sysinternals Suite

Process Explorer

This bag of applications brought to you by Microsoft is the cream of the crop.   If you haven’t downloaded the who suite of tools from sysinternals.  You really should  do it now.   I really like the process monitor and process monitoring tools to help me see what might be wrong with a system.   It’s got a whole lot of apps to use when you need to either kill an app.   I could go on and on about this pack of apps from Microsoft but it is definitely a grab bag for me.  This is something that I have on my USB for when I might need it.

CloneZilla

Clonzilla Live CD/USB

Another great app that you can load on your USB and use it when you need to copy partitions or even whole drives from one drive to another.   It is a free utility that you can use on any system.  You’ll just need to create a bootable USB.   I use the app call YUMI to create a multiboot usb and put all my favorite and important ISO on the USB for when I need them.

Portable Apps

Portable Apps

This is another one that I put on my USB just to be cautious and know that I don’t have to use anything on a system that I might not trust. They’ve got a slew of apps that you can use for everything that you might need. What I like about portable apps is they even have antivirus and password generators. They have a lot of what I will use from time to time because they just make it easy to scan an infected system from my usb without having to load the antivirus before boot. They have some great tools all around and You should check them out.

RevoUninstaller Portable

This is great utility to remove all the crap that any system that you buy from a store or even from Amazon will be removed without much effort from you.  You can run this off a USB or even install it and remove all the stuff that gets loaded on from the Acer, Dell, or other OEMS.   It helps me out really well because I have seen clients systems speed up by removing all the annoying programs that aren’t even being used.

Windows Offline update (WSUS)

Windows offline Update (WSUS)

Let’s face it, if your client hasn’t updated their system for quite some time or the system in question doesn’t have a way to update because of no internet this is the best solution for you.   Download the updates and put it on a USB.   Most of the time, it will be a good around 20gb or 30gb depending on which windows updates you get from Windows 7 to Windows 10, you will have each one being like 3gb or 4gb a piece.   It actually helps me when it comes to updating a client’s computer without having to wait for it to download the updates.   I can just update and reboot.  This has been a great time saver for me when it comes to being a computer technician.

What’s your favorite portable app or even just an app that you use on a regular basis.  I’d like to hear what yours is and why.  Why not leave a comment and tell others and help others who might not know of a good app to use.