Anybody who purchased considered one of Valve’s Steam Decks at launch bought a really explicit mannequin of strong state drive put in of their system. Anybody shopping for yet another not too long ago has acquired a special drive, one which’s doubtlessly slower.
As Hardwareluxx report (by way of PC Gamer), all Steam Decks that initially shipped with both a 256 or 512GB SSD would have had them related by way of 4 “lanes”. Now some items are transport with drives that join by way of simply two “lanes”, a change that might in idea end in slower efficiency because you’re basically halving the drive’s bandwidth.
This swap wasn’t publicly introduced by way of 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 modifying the hand-held’s specs web page again on the finish of Might.
Consequently, the one manner you’ll find out whether or not you could have the unique SSD put in in your Steam Deck or not is to examine its specs within the system’s menu. Below “Exhausting Disk Drive”, as PC Gamer advise, you should search for:
In the fitting panel it’ll have a code. Our 512GB evaluate 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 examine 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 type of with a drive operating on a Gen3 x2 interface.
I’ve been cautious with my language about efficiency above as a result of we haven’t seen any assessments that may show there’s a transparent distinction in stuff like load occasions or fps between drives, a minimum of on video games presently obtainable and absolutely supported on the platform. Which is comprehensible given the actual fact the information has solely simply been reported, and that with items nonetheless laborious to pay money for few if any folks may have two Steam Decks they will instantly evaluate with.
It also needs to be famous that there are every kind of how a sport’s efficiency may be bottlenecked exterior of an SSD’s personal efficiency, and that Valve would have examined these parts internally earlier than launch, so you’d anticipate that had there been any noticeable hits on how a sport ran, the change would have been extra publicly introduced. We’ve contacted the corporate for remark although and can replace if we hear again.
