Anybody who purchased certainly one of Valve’s Steam Decks at launch bought a really explicit mannequin of stable state drive put in of their machine. Anybody shopping for another not too long ago has acquired a special drive, one which’s probably slower.
As Hardwareluxx report (through PC Gamer), all Steam Decks that initially shipped with both a 256 or 512GB SSD would have had them linked through 4 “lanes”. Now some models are transport with drives that join through simply two “lanes”, a change that would in idea lead to slower efficiency because you’re primarily halving the drive’s bandwidth.
This swap wasn’t publicly introduced through 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 enhancing the hand held’s specs web page again on the finish of Might.
In consequence, the one method yow will discover out whether or not you have got the unique SSD put in in your Steam Deck or not is to test its specs within the system’s menu. Underneath “Arduous Disk Drive”, as PC Gamer advise, you have to search for:
In the correct panel it’ll have a code. Our 512GB overview 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 test whether or not your code ends with -E13T, too, or one thing else fully. 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 exams that might show there’s a transparent distinction in stuff like load occasions or fps between drives, at the very least on video games presently out there and totally supported on the platform. Which is comprehensible given the very fact the information has solely simply been reported, and that with models nonetheless exhausting to pay money for few if any folks could have two Steam Decks they will immediately examine with.
It must also be famous that there are every kind of the way a sport’s efficiency may be bottlenecked outdoors of an SSD’s personal efficiency, and that Valve would have examined these parts internally earlier than launch, so you’d count on 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.
