Sabrent, the SSD maker, has done what everyone wanted and launched a commercially available 2230 NVMe drive for the Steam Deck and other devices.
Upgrading a Steam Deck SSD can be a little bit of a minefield to navigate. Having to use eBay to grab items, or going through sites like Mouser, isn’t exactly the easiest process.
Sabrent has seen a hole in the market and is quickly acting on it. The PC component manufacturer is launching an easily accessible 1TB 2230 NVMe. A 2230 NVMe is one of the smallest sizes available to the NVMe family.
2230 NVMe SSDs used within Microsoft Surface devices and other high-end portable laptops. The unique size was cause for concern at the announcement of the Steam Deck but was slowly quelled as resellers began acquiring them.
Sabrent’s NVMe will be launching with a PCIe Gen4 controller, which is backward compatible with the Steam Deck’s 3.0 slot. When in the matching slot, it should reach up to 5 GB/s (up to 4750 MB/s read and 4300 MB/s write).
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No more second-hand dodgy drives
Cleverly, in the press release, Sabrent does bring up that releasing these to the general public will avoid instances of customers receiving bad second-hand drives.
The Steam Deck’s SSD situation is a peculiar one. While it’s not necessary to upgrade to a terabyte of storage, it’s highly recommended. The MicroSD card is perfect for storing and launching games, but downloading to one can be an issue.
Steam downloads and unpacks games in chunks, mostly to avoid overwhelming the poor thing. The NVMe drive inside gets around this with its architecture, allowing for faster unpacking and downloads. This is thanks to the better sequential write speed onboard the drives.
You can see our top recommendations for microSD cards, as well as our guide on how to upgrade your Steam Deck’s SSD.
