Valve includes PCIe 3 x2 SSDs instead of x4 on some Steam Deck consoles

It seems that some Steam Deck models including SSD 256 or 512 GB are shipping with slower drives from those originally specified. According to HardwareLuxx tells usthis change happened at the end of May when they updated their page with the specifications including PCIe M.2 2230 Gen 3 x2 SSD drives instead of x4 as initially announced. This cuts the bandwidth used by the SSD in half, from 4 GB/s to 2 GB/s.

This is something that will no doubt annoy many users who had purchased their Steam Deck in this condition of a PCIe 3 x4 SSD and replaced it with a slower one. Valve literally states “Some 256GB and 512GB models come with a PCIe Gen 3 x2 SSD. in our tests we found no difference in gaming performance between x2 and x4”. It may not affect gaming, but it may affect the performance of other applications.

A theme that comes after a mod will be announced that offered more performance installing a third-party and larger SSD, and that Valve engineers advised against perform because it could shorten the life of the console.

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