Anybody who purchased one in every of Valve’s Steam Decks at launch obtained a really specific mannequin of strong state drive put in of their system. Anybody shopping for yet another just lately has acquired a distinct drive, one which’s doubtlessly slower.
As Hardwareluxx report (through PC Gamer), all Steam Decks that initially shipped with both a 256 or 512GB SSD would have had them related through 4 “lanes”. Now some items are transport with drives that join through simply two “lanes”, a change that would in idea lead to slower efficiency because you’re basically halving the drive’s bandwidth.
This swap wasn’t publicly introduced through a press launch or assertion, and Steam Decks transport with these newer drives haven’t been differentiated by a brand new mannequin quantity. Certainly the one public point out of the change in any respect got here from Valve quietly enhancing the hand-held’s specs web page again on the finish of Could.
In consequence, the one manner you will discover out whether or not you may have the unique SSD put in in your Steam Deck or not is to verify its specs within the system’s menu. Underneath “Laborious Disk Drive”, as PC Gamer advise, you’ll want to search for:
In the suitable panel it’ll have a code. Our 512GB evaluation mannequin has a Phison ESMP512GKB4C3-E13TS drive. That appears to be a customized 2230 SSD utilizing Phison’s Gen3 x4 E13 controller. So, you need to verify whether or not your code ends with -E13T, too, or one thing else totally. If it features a code like -E08 (Phison’s Gen3 x2 controller) then your Deck is a kind of with a drive working on a Gen3 x2 interface.
I’ve been cautious with my language about efficiency above as a result of we haven’t seen any checks that will show there’s a transparent distinction in stuff like load instances or fps between drives, a minimum of on video games at the moment accessible and absolutely supported on the platform. Which is comprehensible given the very fact the information has solely simply been reported, and that with items nonetheless laborious to pay money for few if any folks can have two Steam Decks they’ll instantly examine with.
It also needs to be famous that there are every kind of how a recreation’s efficiency could be bottlenecked exterior of an SSD’s personal efficiency, and that Valve would have examined these parts internally earlier than launch, so you’d count on that had there been any noticeable hits on how a recreation ran, the change would have been extra publicly introduced. We’ve contacted the corporate for remark although and can replace if we hear again.
