Steam Deck Storage SHOWDOWN | 5 Drives Tested!

Thank you for the easy to understand information 🙂

keep it up bro, quality videos!

Respect to your knowledge 🙏 Thank you for being the goat of tinkering on the steam deck community 🙌

I bought 64 sd and then i bought 2tb ssd with two 512 micro sd card

Great video! Would love to see something on 2TB 2230s now that they're becoming much more available from numerous manufacturers, & if one from like Team Group or AddLink is similar in performance to a Corsair or Kioxia.

Thanks for the info 👍🏻

Does it effect the performance if the storage of ssd / sd card is full or nearly full?
I heard there should always be 10% free otherwise it slows down!?

I've recently started back school, and I've been using both my Deck and phone as computing devices for school a lot more than my laptop weirdly enough. I just never bring it around, it's too big, but the 64GB EMMC drive is just way to small to use the Deck as an actual PC. I found myself with basically no space left after allocating 16gb of swap and downloading a few versions of Proton, and while the SD card works fine for games, a lot of programs either refuse to install on removable storage, or don't detect the SD card by default, which is really annoying when trying to do more laptop centric things.

I bought the 1tb Sabrent drive after seeing you say it has the same power usage as the default Deck drive, and I hope that it will solve most of those issues.

Hopefully it will also allow me to actually have enough space to do emulation too, storing ROMs on the SD card was very hit and miss depending on the emulator, and with 1gb of free space on the SSD I'm not really fitting a whole lot on it either.

Great stuff! I definitely need to upgrade my 64GB steam deck

depends of cpu and gpu specs 64gb can be upgrades to 512 or 1tb ssd m2

VALVE SHOULD HIRE YOU

Great video! I have a 64gb deck. And I will for sure upgrade the storage on it. Blackfriday is coming up.

Excellent and informative video! Would love to see a guide from you on how you swap the hard drives out. I'm tempted to get the 64 gb and swap to a 1 TB SSD but the swapping part is intimidating 😅

If you want to reinstall / uninstall large games a lot, isn't it a good idea to just get an external hdd and relocate the game there? it's going to be way faster than redownloading, even if it's like a garbage-ass usb stick.

PromoSM 💖

I’m curious to how much better the 2tb ssd is. It’s crazy to me that those aren’t too much more than a 1tb micro sd

I just upgraded my 64gb deck with 128gb ssd (yes I'm cheapskate but it only cost me 5 bucks so...)

And the biggest difference is now that I can save my shader cache in internal storage, quite a lot of games reduced in loading significantly.

My favorite game, Monster Hunter World, usually takes 2 whole minute to load a map, but now it reduced to less than 30s.

It looks like micro SD, and SSDs are about the same price now. I would probably just upgrade the internal SSD unless going with a smaller micro SD while saving money for a larger internal drive. The only advantage of micro SD at this point is not redownloading your entire steam library if you have to format steam.

0/10 chapter 2 and 3 weren't named "Line" and "Sinker"

Can I just say, as a scientist, I absolutely love the attention to detail in explaining testing conditions <3

Thank you for another informative deck video! You truly are the steam deck king at this point. I'm here for it.

You're too smart to directly work for Valve. You should consider a partnership with Valve where you work out small license fee if they pack in cryoutils as part of the stock OS. They don't have enough talent or really, the time and resources to keep up with the community. Vavle also knows the community is what makes or break them. Keep up the great work, it's not going unnoticed. You have a bright future friend.

Just a side note:
I'm really hopeful, you will be able to make starfield work on the steam deck.

Without word from valve or bethesda saying if it will work, I feel like you can make it happen.

Continue the great work :)

you are back!
Have you managed to make returnal playable or is this just a test? It's the one game Valve just says "cant be made to work"

just to know whe i played CP2077 us low to medium settings for 40-60 fps

Yes, size always matters. Always!!!!!! 😅

Thanks a lot!! Can you do a similar video for the ROG Ally?

Hi Kyle, love your work! Do you do game specific modding guides? I've started playing Fallout New Vegas again, which runs great, but I really miss some of the quality of life mods and don't really know where to start as it's one of the more complex games to mod even on Windows as I understand.

Hi thanks for the great content and your CryoUtility!! I have a question, do you know why a steam deck won't wake up from sleep mode??

Dude, thanks for posting. As always great content. Regarding you testing RDR2 why not just move games to a USB drive? I do this to move games between my linux game box and the steam deck, saves a lot of download time. Get a big USB HDD, format the drive in desktop mode or in your favorite distro with ext4, mount it, set it up in steam and bob's your uncle. I've been doing it for years now just to manage which games are on SSD or which I move to my back catalog. Linux gaming / sneakernet for the win ;)

I modded my steam deck and installed a full size 2280 4tb nvme on my steam deck + 1tb microsd. I might try this, thanks!

So if I had a 256GB model, it’s better if I upgrade the SSD vs buying a 1TB Micro SD card?

After overclocking the absolute crap out of my steam deck next thing is definitely a bigger sd card and ssd. Probably gonna cover it in k5 pro as well since it still gets too hot with an undervolt.

Please do a deck dive for one or both spider man games

Those kdiskmark results are interesting. I wonder why the 512gb drive performed much worse than the 256 in write speed? My 512gb SSD (that I replaced the 64gb mmc with) got 2141 MB/s read and 1089 MB/s write on SEQ1M Q1T1. I suppose that my SSD is faster than the default one used by the 512gb steam deck

Thank you for the informative video. I upgraded my 64GB eMMC to a 256GB SSD since that 64GB almost got full with just shader caches, and since the 256GB SSD was only $20 brand new at the time of purchase.

Excellent comprehensive video! 🤔 I have a steam deck 512 GB version and I have been indecisive if I wanted to make the jump to the one terabyte drive. 🤯 This video helped me make the final decision to hold off until a 2 terabyte drive or larger becomes available. 🧐 Thank you!👍

Absolutely incredible comparison, I thought I was watching Digital Foundry for a moment! :D

Thanks!

Another thing that I noticed is that the time to install games show massive differences based on the storage. Installing to the MicroSD card can take several times longer than installing to the SSD.
In some cases it was evene faster to install the game to the SSD, then move the install to the SDcard, than to install the game to the SDcard directly.

I got a Steamdeck just recently and just discovered your channel, but gotta say Cryo utilities is mentioned in every forum I’ve been whilst looking for tutorials and things to do with it. It is truly admirable that despite your personal and financial situation (my deepest condolences and I sincerely hope you’re in a better place now), you still make Cryo utilities for free and and open to folks like me and the entire community, If someone at VALVE is reading this, YOU NEED to offer this guy a Job in the steamDeck team ASAP!.

Cheers man, and wishing you the best!

Amazing job and really helped me decide the pros and cons for upgrading the ssd.

such a shame the storage is a sticking point for the deck (and also in stock and steam deals ahem..), like most devices these days, i would keeeel for a cartridge style solution similar to the xbox/ps5, its a no brainer, i dislike having to tool around

hope whoever bought my steam deck on ebay enjoys this video

rog ally decimates

Hey cryo! There’s a steam deck accessory called the “monoblock” it’s a replacement copper cooler which claims to cool it by atleast 20 degrees by cooling the APU, RAM, VRM AND PMIC Chips. Would love to see your take on it

Excellent content as usual.

Well. I just learned why Horizon gets mad stutters on my system... Massive chunks of data being loaded.

thats a Question ADAM22 can answer for ya