So when the steamdeck came out I hade pre-ordered the 256GB variant, and well soon discovered that it holds like 3 games, so my first approach was to get many 256GB SDCards to remedy this issue. It worked great for a while but became tedious to know what games on what sdcard, im still very happy with the solution tho.
Anyway this year the marked had finaly matured to the point where the 1TB SSDs that fit the steamdeck cost a reasonable amount and so I sensed the time was in to do the hard swap!
So how do you do the swap?
I had read up on many different approaches, some used the recovery image, some did a full reinstall.. well I wanted the most bang for the buck approach and just simply clone the drive to a bigger drive using the very hardware it was meant for, the steamdeck!
So how this goes down is that you buy a SSD enclosure, and just plug it into the steamdeck, once in you do some dd magic and you have cloned the very drive you are running onto another drive.
What do I need to do this magic?
NVMe USB External Enclosure: You’ll need this to connect your new SSD to the Steam Deck during the cloning process. A Suitable 1TB SSD: Yep you need a chunky new ssd. A sudo password on you user account - yep you will need to clone the drive as super user, obviously, so this needs to be in place.
- Thats it, you are ready my friend!
Now locate the external drive (most likely) /dev/sda with fdisk or blkid and run the below command:
sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=/dev/sda oflag=sync bs=128M status=progress
Essentially you are saying to dd to use /dev/nvme0n1 as input and yes its the very drive running while your typing.
Then output will be the new ssd from the usb-c port, oflag=sync means they should be equal to each other. and last but not least, show you some kind of progress.
once this is done, just shutdown, swap the bad boys out and start up your steamdeck.
Here is a video of the process:
Enjoy !!
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