Steam Deck SSD can also be connected via PCIe 3.0 x2
The Steam Deck handheld console launched by Valve has attracted quite a lot of attention. It is equipped with a 7-inch screen, uses AMD Van Gogh APU, and is equipped with 16GB LPDDR5 memory. It is equipped with an M.2 2230 interface, and it gives three options for the hard disk scheme. One is 64GB eMMC, which is PCI-E 2.0 x1 lane, while 256GB and 512GB are PCI-E 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs, but recently Valve modified their website, and you may buy PCI-E 3.0 x2 SSD.
This change was discovered by HardwareLuxx, which actually happened around late May, earlier than the recent popular modification of Steam Deck SSD. At present, some 256GB and 512GB models will be equipped with PCI-E 3.0 x2 SSDs on the specification sheets of the Steam Deck official website in the United States and Germany.
The SSD limit the speed of the PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface is about 3.5GB/s, while that of the PCI-E 3.0 x2 is about 1.8GB/s. Since the performance of the SSD does not affect the number of game frames, and the SSD bandwidth of PCI-E 3.0 x2 is sufficient for most games, so the impact is really small, but it must be very unpleasant for users to shrink the SSD.
So the topic of SSDs on Steam Deck will only get hotter, and players may replace SSDs with larger capacity and faster speeds by themselves. Valve’s engineers warn against the unauthorized replacement of M.2 2242 SSDs. The reason is that this increases power consumption and affects heat dissipation. These changes may lead to poor heat dissipation of this part of the power supply chip, resulting in a substantial increase in the working temperature and affecting the service life of the machine, but this certainly cannot stop the enthusiasm of players to make their own modifications.
So the topic of SSDs on Steam Deck will only get hotter, and players may replace SSDs with larger capacity and faster speeds by themselves. Valve’s engineers warn against the unauthorized replacement of M.2 2242 SSDs. The reason is that this increases power consumption and affects heat dissipation. These changes may lead to poor heat dissipation of this part of the power supply chip, resulting in a substantial increase in the working temperature and affecting the service life of the machine, but this certainly cannot stop the enthusiasm of players to make their own modifications.
