Fancy more storage space on your Steam Deck? This mod adds a huge 61TB SSD to Valve's portable PC.
The Steam Deck is currently available in three different storage options, but if even the largest 512GB NVMe model isn't enough for you and your vast Steam library, then worry no more — a crazy modification carried out by StorageReview has upgraded the capacity of the Steam Deck via an SSD mod, adding a total 61TB (yes, terabytes) of available storage to Valve's handheld.
This ambitious and rather costly mod adds a ton of additional storage to the portable PC by connecting up an enterprise-level SSD — this was done by replacing the Steam Deck's internal SSD unit with an M.2 to U.2 adapter. This adapter was then in turn connected up to a 61.44TB SSD housed in an external enclosure, complete with its own power supply.
The SDD in question was the Solidigm P5336 — a beefy, relatively new high-density storage option that represents something of a "milestone in SSD technology".
Of course, the fact that the Steam Deck was hooked up to an external SSD means that the Valve handheld isn't quite so portable with this modification in place — but it's an interesting bit of admittedly impractical experimentation that's fun to see working all the same.
Shady Storage on Steam Deck
Beyond just doing something to see if it's possible, you may be wondering what the actual reason for doing this curious bit of storage testing was? Well, it comes down to the Steam Deck's ongoing shader storage issue.
The storage capacity of the Steam Deck is increasingly at odds with the large, often gargantuan file sizes found in modern PC games — with many requiring lots of additional space for storing shader caches. These shaders are needed to help render graphics in game, and handling and processing these files can prove costly from a performance point of view — particularly for a portable battery powered device.
As such, the Steam Deck attempts to solve this shader issue by pre-caching these files — however storing these shaders for pre-caching takes up a significant amount of space. The result can often mean that games with extensive detail can often require several gigabytes of additional storage for these shader caches alone.
This goes some way to explain why this mod from StorageReview was attempted — it provides a huge amount of space, thus removing the need to frequently manage and clear files on your Steam Deck.
Yes, it's not a mod for most of us — but it's cool to see. If you want something a bit more accessible, then Western Digital have new 1TB and 2TB SSD options for the Steam Deck.
Jordan Ranous
