Everyone who bought one of Valve’s Steam decks at launch has a very specific model of solid state drive installed in their device. Anyone who bought one recently got a different drive, namely one possibly Slower.
As hardwareluxx report (above PC gamer), all Steam decks that originally shipped with a 256GB or 512GB SSD would have been connected via four “lanes”. Now, some devices ship with drives connected by only two “lanes,” a change that could theoretically result in slower performance since you’re essentially halving the drive’s bandwidth.
This swap was not announced publicly via a press release or statement, and Steam decks that ship with these newer drives were not distinguished by a new model number. In fact, the only public mention of the change at all came from Valve, who quietly edited the handheld’s specs page in late May.
This is the only way to find out if you have the original SSD installed or not in your Steam Deck is to check its specifications in the system menu. Under “Hard Disk” how PC gamer to adviseyou need to look for:
In the right pane it will have a code. Our 512 GB test model has a Phison ESMP512GKB4C3-E13TS drive. This appears to be a custom 2230 SSD using Phison’s Gen3 x4 E13 controller. So you want to check if your code also ends with -E13T or something else entirely. If it contains a code like -E08 (Gen3 x2 controller by Phison), then your deck is one of those with a drive running on a Gen3 x2 interface.
I was wary of my language regarding performance above because we haven’t seen any tests that would do so prove There is a noticeable difference in things like load times or fps between drives, at least for games that are currently available and fully supported on the platform. Which is understandable given that the news has only just been reported, and with units that are still hard to come by, few, if any, will have two Steam decks to compare them to directly.
It should also be noted that there are all sorts of ways a game’s performance can be impacted outside of an SSD’s own performance, and Valve would have tested these components internally prior to release, so you’d expect that would have If there had been noticeable hits to the flow of a game, the change would have been announced more publicly. However, we have reached out to the company for comment and will update when we receive feedback.
