Anyone who bought one of Valve’s Steam platforms at launch got a very special model of solid state drive installed in their devices. Anyone who buys one recently has received a different engine, one possibly slower.

as such Hardwarelux Report (Across computer games), all Steam Decks originally shipped with a 256 or 512 GB SSD that could have been connected via four “lanes”. Some units now only ship with drives connected via “two lanes,” a change that could theoretically result in slower performance since you’re essentially halving the bandwidth of the drive.

This swap Not announced publicly through a press release or statement, and Steam Decks shipping with these newer drives was not distinguished by a new model number. In fact, the only public sign of the change ever came from Valve quietly adjusting the mobile device’s specs page at the end of May.

As a result, the only way you can know if you have the original Installing an SSD in your Steam Deck or not is to check its specifications in the system menu. Under “Hard Disk Drive”, as such computer games adviceyou need to search for:

In the right panel it will have an icon. The 512GB review model has a Phison ESMP512GKB4C3-E13TS drive. This appears to be a custom 2230 SSD using Phison’s Gen3 x4 E13 controller. So, you want to check if your code ends in -E13T too, or something else entirely. If it includes a code like -E08 (Phison’s Gen3 x2 controller), your deck is one of those with a drive running on the Gen3 x2 interface.

I’ve been wary of my language regarding the above performance because we haven’t seen any tests that would fix There is a distinct difference in things like load times or frames per second between the drives, at least in games that are currently available and fully supported on the platform. Which is understandable given the fact that the news was just reported, and that with units still hard to come by, few people would have steam floors directly comparable.

It should also be noted that there are all kinds of ways in which game performance can be throttled outside the performance of a proprietary SSD, and that Valve would have tested these components internally prior to release, so you’d expect that It was There were no noticeable outcomes on how the game went, and the change would have been announced further. We’ve contacted the company for comment though and will update if we hear back.