If you ordered yourself a Steam Deck (opens in new tab), there’s something you should know. Valve appears to have recently changed the specs on the site, meaning you could potentially land a downgraded SSD model when your Deck arrives.
Which versions does this affect, you ask?
It’s the 256GB and 512GB devices, but you won’t know if you’re getting the weaker storage until you actually have it in your hands. Though we have reached out to Valve for official comment.
The news slipped mostly under the radar until now, but apparently Valve had been doing some testing, and at some point in late May decided that some Steam Decks would be coming with PCI express 3.0 x2 instead of the initially specified x4 SSD.
Under the storage heading in the spec table, the Steam Deck site (opens in new tab) now reads:
256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4 or PCIe Gen 3 x2*)
512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4 or PCIe Gen 3 x2*)
*Some 256GB and 512GB models ship with a PCIe Gen 3 x2 SSD. In our testing, we did not see any impact to gaming performance between x2 and x4.
A quick check on the Wayback Machine (opens in new tab) confirms this detail was only added after May 28, since May 27 clearly states both 256GB and 512GB drives will run on the x4 NVMe interface, as reported by Hardware Luxx (opens in new tab). Valve is adamant that the change wont impact gaming performance, but there’s no mention of load times or responsiveness, which we would expect to have taken a dip.
If you want to find out which version you have, hold down your Steam Deck’s power button and select Desktop Mode. Then search Device Viewer in the Applications Menu search bar. Under Devices, go to Storage Drives, and tap the Hard Disk Drive.
In the right panel it’ll have a code. Our 512GB review model has a Phison ESMP512GKB4C3-E13TS drive. That seems to be a custom 2230 SSD using Phison’s Gen3 x4 E13 controller. So, you want to check whether your code ends with -E13T, too, or something else entirely. If it includes a code like -E08 (Phison’s Gen3 x2 controller) then your Deck is one of those with a drive running on a Gen3 x2 interface.
It’s unclear why Valve decided to change the specs, but I’m guessing those who were unaware of the change, and have already made their purchase, may have something to say. We’ll update as soon as we hear anything back from Valve on the reasoning behind the change, and whether it will impact the speed of the device in real terms.
