If I swap the main SSD, is the only option a complete wipe and reset? I’d like to keep various settings and how I’ve customized the desktop over the year+ with my 64GB deck.
Don’t have a steam deck, but what I used to do on Linux when upgrading drives is just dd the old drive over. Sure it’s inefficient as hell, but with pcie 4.0 speeds You’re looking at 20 min to make a byte-for-byte copy of your old 1 tb drive, which you can then extend your partitions to make them bigger.
Do people actually see a need for this? I noticed the same thing with the ps vita back in the day. People wanted the BIGGEST storage possible.
But in the case of the vita and the steam deck: There are a few games I keep installed at all times because of course. But mostly, I am playing one or two games at a time. I’ll probably update storage when I finally need to open my deck (for whatever reason) but haven’t seen a strong need to.
Like, the people who need 2 TB: What are you actually installing?
I’m the target market. With Steam I keep everything I ever played on my current PC installed forever, or until I run out of disk space and have to triage.
If you have slow internet and a few games that have 100+ GB you don’t want to delete anything if possible. I bought myself a 8tb hdd last year to move games there if I don’t play them and the ones I actively play stay on my 1tb nvme.
My household had multiple people who use the Deck. I upgraded to a 1TB (plus the 512GB SDCard) which is enough for now but games ain’t getting smaller in size
Example of a game that works nicely on the deck, and is giving me a great portable replay (other than the EA Launcher): Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
Size of that game: ~110GB
Also, personally, because of the slightly shonky WiFi download speeds and that I use it offline/whilst travelling a lot, I leave a bunch of games on there just in case I fancy them.
To me, more space would be good. I am unsure I’d need 2TB, but it would solve a lot. I’ve also got a few hundred gigs of other launchers (battle net) and ROMs on my SSD currently that are less easy to manage than Steam installs… again, the larger drive would just lighten the worry.
And is narrative enough that I would generally prioritize that while playing. Could see a case to leave it installed while taking a break in between games though.
They really should have had them as "free" DLCs for a base game so you could install and uninstall them individually more easily. They are at least separated out into folders that you can just move to some slower secondary storage like a USB drive to free up space of ones you aren't currently playing then move them back when you want to play those games and it'll work fine, but an official way to do so would have been nice.
The Steam Deck can play more than steam games. I usually keep about 30-40 Steam games installed, but most are really light little games for casual play with just a couple of large AAA games at any given time.
But outside of Steam, the Deck can emulate up to PS3 and Switch games. And theres not really a good cloud-based solution without having to switch into Desktop mode. So I have my usually about a dozen PS2 games, one or two PS3 games, and my whole PS1 library on the Deck. Then every couple months I’ll go into Desktop mode and delete what I’ve beat and copy over new games from my gaming PC.
I’m also not a dock user. Maybe I would be if I didn’t have a gaming PC, but for me the point of using the Deck is to not be attached to anything. Otherwise an external HDD might help. I’m thinking about eventually building a NAS: I’m not sure if I could have games live there and still playable on the deck though?
While I definitely allegedly have more roms and isos on my deck than I am likely to play in any reasonable time frame:
There are a LOT of really bad guides for the deck out there that encourage people to install ninety bazillian pieces of software to transfer a file. Look in to just learning how ssh and scp/rsync work. Lets you manage all the files and the like from your primary PC while your deck is just turned on and charging. And WSL for Windows 10/11 means you don’t even need any “new” software on windows (let alone an OS with a native *nix component).
I use nextcloud to sync game saves because that is a rare enough occurrence and I use a local nextcloud for other stuff on my network. But for games and even a lot of updates? Just turn the deck on and then go to my main PC. And if my nextcloud ever borks itself for the umpteenth time? I could whip up an rsync script that checks if the deck is on and on my network and synchronize saves if so (and then just set it to run once an hour).
Ah I’ve looked into such things before and everything I found started with installing tons of extra software to customize the “gaming mode” UI first. So I landed on just using SMB. I tried adding Dolphin (the file browser, not the emulator) as a non-Steam game but it didn’t work on gaming mode. When I was younger and broker such software solutions were more attractive. A larger internal SSD is the more expensive, but also much simpler and more elegant solution for me. I DO wish there were more basic utilities like a file browser built into the gaming mode OS. And for all I know maybe Valve is looking into that.
Also I use SyncThing to sync my saves: I like how it’s all just stored locally and works on Windows, Linux, and Android. And it works pretty well as a non-Steam game in gaming mode on the Deck.
Yeah. ssh and rsync are built into linux (effectively). The difference is that you use those commands from a different computer. Default to the terminal in Mac and basically all flavors of Linux. Requires WSL for Windows (although I think powershell has equivalent commands).
So rather than switch to desktop mode on the deck and possibly installing ninety other things, you just leave it on and then type a few commands on your primary PC.
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