Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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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.
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.