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Valve designer: No, seriously, don’t make this Steam Deck SSD mod“Hi, please don’t do this”
“Hi, please don’t do this”
Also in Steam Deck news, Valve’s Lawrence Yang – a designer who worked on the on the handheld PC – has weighed in on a widely shared mod that replaces the pre-installed SSD with a larger, faster model. His advice: don’t do it.
We Answer Your Steam Deck Questions For 19 minutes StraightWatch on YouTube
We Answer Your Steam Deck Questions For 19 minutes Straight
While Yang didn’t ask anyone to refrain from swapping theirSteam DeckSSD in a general sense, he did add that “most 2242 M.2 drives draw more power and get hotter than what Deck is designed for,” echoing a caution that Valve previously expressed in their ownSteam Deck teardown video. “Off the shelf” SSDs, it explained, could cause problems ranging from overheating to lower battery life to diminished wireless networking performance.
I guess you could sum up Valve’s overall stance on Steam Deck modding as “be it on your head,” but in this case the apparent risk of overheating and power mismanagement was seemingly just too much for a fully hands-off approach. Yang’s tweets on his personal account don’t necessarily make for official Valve statements, of course, but they’re arguably worth listening to, even if you eventually decide to grab the screwdriver and chance it.
Personally, I think the Steam Deck’s openness and self-repairability are positive traits, even if Valve aren’t always that keen on users taking advantage of them, And there could be some worthwhile mods out there in terms of thumbstick and shoulder button swaps, or maybe even alternate chassis designs. With storage specifically, though, I’d still argue that most folk are better off justgetting a microSD card. These are only barely slower than the Deck’s stock SSD for game load times, are much easier to install and swap out, and don’t cost much more than M.2 SSDs even if you go for a roomy 1TB model.
