Valve Says Some Steam Decks Ship With a Slower SSD

pcmag.com:

Valve has quietly updated the spec page for its Steam Deck to make it clear some of the handheld gaming PCs will ship with a slower SSD fitted inside.

As Tom's Hardware reports(Opens in a new window), the spec update was first noticed by German website HardwareLuxx(Opens in a new window) and carried out on May 28. Under the Storage section, Valve now includes a note(Opens in a new window) explaining that "Some 256GB and 512GB models ship with a PCIe Gen3 x2 SSD."

Until now, the SSD used in the Steam Deck was a PCIe Gen3 x4, which means it had access to four lanes of the PCIe bus and therefore double the bandwidth of an x2 SSD. What does it mean in reality? Each PCIe Gen3 lane has a peak throughput of around 1GB/s, meaning an x2 SSD can achieve 2GB/s while an x4 doubles that to 4GB/s.

The good news is, use of a slower SSD apparently doesn't have any impact on how fast games load on the Steam Deck. Valve also makes this clear in its Storage note, "In our testing, we did not see any impact to gaming performance between x2 and x4."

So, if you order the 256GB or the 512 GB version of the Steam Deck it's down to luck whether you receive the handheld with an x2 or x4 SSD inside. As it makes no difference to the performance, there's no need to worry about it (although I'm sure a few new Deck owners will be frustrated when they find out they have the slower drive). You could always fit a faster drive in the future, of course, but don't use a mod to squeeze a 2242 M.2 SSD in there.

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