Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
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I would highly recommend upgrading the SSD. There is a major difference in download/install speed, update speed, and a notable improvement in loading times. Some newer games will struggle to run on a microSD at all, because they load assets in real time and the read speed is too slow.
I typically install small and older games to my microSD, but for anything modern or larger than a few GB I stick to my SSD.
For cloning mine when I upgraded, I actually just removed the old SSD from my deck, plugged it and the new SSD into my computer (didn't bother with screwing them down), and cloned them there. My main PC is linux, so it could clone the ext4/btrfs formatted drive without any additional software. If you do this with a windows PC you'll probably need special software. Another issue you can run into (especially with windows based cloning tools) is that many of them will clone the partitions exactly, meaning your new drive (despite being larger) only has partitions sized the same size as the original drive. On linux you can clone the partitions and then expand the partition to the full drive size, but I don't know if this can be done with the compatible windows clone tools.
Your best bet (if your main PC is windows) is probably to make a linux bootable drive (can be any linux distro with live boot and gparted/kparted, but Rescuezilla and Clonezilla are made specifically for this kind of thing) and boot the PC from that. That will give you full access to the linux tools for easily cloning and resizing the drive.
Alternatively, you may also just want to install the new SSD in the Deck, and reinstall steamOS using a steamOS recovery drive. It won't transfer over your files, but all your steam games/cloud saves should be easy to redownload. This is probably the easiest option.
Related: Medicat/Ventoy changed my computing life. Everyone should have one, they’re insanely easy to set up and the software is all freeeee!
I'd say it kinda depends on what kind of game you play on your deck. I play a lot of smallish indie games and moat of them are on the SD card. I keep the ssd for when I want to play bigger games.
Yeah for sure, any 2D games or smaller games usually get installed to my microSD. But I usually don't want to install anything larger than a couple GB to the microSD just because it takes forever to install and update.
I should also mention that some larger games (ie Cyberpunk) specifically have slow storage settings, that will try to compensate for using slower storage like a microSD. It won't help with install/update times or general load times, but it will help some of the gameplay issues you can run into while playing.
Thanks for all the detail. My daily driver is currently a windows machine, but I have looked into swapping to a Linux system.
I will keep this in mind and will very likely just get a new SSD. I have noticed some longer load times.
Due to budgeting, I will like just reinstall and use the SteamOS recovery key. Only downside is setting up EmuDeck, Lutris, and Decky again.
On Windows, Macrium Reflect is really good for disk cloning. They used to have a free version, but not anymore. Instead, you can use the 30-day trial and get all the features. They specifically support cloning Linux drives intelligently. It doesn't just go sector by sector, but that's always a fallback for things like LVM (Linux Volume Manager), which it does not natively support.
https://www.macrium.com/blog/cloning-and-imaging-linux-file-systems-39bffeaf6307
External enclosures for NVMe drives are pretty cheap to help with the cloning. Now that I use Linux on my laptop, I simply took my Windows NVMe out of my computer and stuck it in an enclosure and it still boots off USB. That's pretty handy. I bought a UGREEN brand one.
If you can swing it, Sabrent makes some nvme enclosures for the 2230 size the deck uses https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-ne30 that are super reasonable price wise, https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-snveis for full size and is also super reasonable. What I did for mine and my partner's decks upgrading from a 512 GB ssd, if you have drive space you could do with one enclosure. I use the old ssd as a removable drive now so it doesn't got to waste.
Ssd is the way to go for sure, SD card is nice to have but it's very noticeably slower for some things, I tend to use it for emulators and games I don't play frequently.
20 bucks is cheaper enough that I might do it. Setting back up all my emulation and tweaks again seems less fun than the first time.