SMB shared folder from the Steam Deck SD

[CAT]

I would like to transfer files from my windows PC to my Deck. The solutions found online seem extremely complicated, involving third party apps, and transfers from one location to another, then copying to your desired location, witch is wasteful by my opinion., might as well just use a USB Stick, it's easier and faster. Is it impossible to install a samba server on the Steam Deck and share a folder on the SD card so any PC on a network could access it over the network, like Libreelec does? Linux guys, please help us out. On Windows it's simply out of the box, just right click on a folder....share.

[MJ711]

Stop right now. I STRONGLY advise you to not even try to share your SD card from Steam Deck over the network. SD cards are not made to be used in such way.

Post a link to solutions you found. I wonder what that solution is.
It should be possible to use Samba like in every other Linux distro.

[CAT]

And your logical answer is "SD cards are not made to be used in such way"?? I can do it from a windows PC with 4 or 5 clicks and never broke a SD card because of this or got any warning about sharing from an SD card. SD cards are storage mediums, they do not care if you read/write data to them from a Phone, PC, micro-controller, protocol, network or file-system. Like i SAID, Libreelec does this out of the box for KODI, witch runs from an SD card on an Raspberry Pi.

[psymin]

The Dolphin file explorer in Desktop mode for the Steam Deck should be able to mount a remote Samba share without installing any software.

A much easier method is to enable sshd on the deck and then use a SCP or SFTP program on your PC to copy files over. (Filezilla or WinSCP)

[MJ711]

引用自 CAT：

And your logical answer is "SD cards are not made to be used in such way"?? I can do it from a windows PC with 4 or 5 clicks and never broke a SD card because of this or got any warning about sharing from an SD card. SD cards are storage mediums, they do not care if you read/write data to them from a Phone, PC, micro-controller, protocol, network or file-system. Like i SAID, Libreelec does this out of the box for KODI, witch runs from an SD card on an Raspberry Pi.

You can also put your finger into your eye. It is still doable but it hurts a lot.

And "they do care" what and in which way is something writen on cards.

[notboxbot]

引用自 MJ711：

Stop right now. I STRONGLY advise you to not even try to share your SD card from Steam Deck over the network. SD cards are not made to be used in such way.

Could you please explain how SD cards are any different than, say SSDs or HDDs in this regard?
Yes, they are slow (both throughput and IOPS).
Yes, they only have a limited number of write cycles.
But how does any of this disqualify them from being shared via a Samba server?

[vlastimirs]

Bumping this topic- and please no BS about "SD cards are not made to be used in such way"!

I am trying to create a shared folder on the steam deck, and would avoid going through the manual SAMBA setup. any builtin alternatives?

[class101 [OLED deck]]

The builtin alternative in Linux is NFS or SSH, nfs tools don't look present in the SteamOS read-only but ssh is, then from Windows you could use WinSCP, this is file transfer over SSH

[St]

You can make a smb mount on your sd and write to it, its really not an issue. Especially if you are just droppin a file now and then. What is an issue if you install a linux distribution / windows on the sd card and it does constant small writes (swap) which kill the card in no time . Anyone that has run a rasperry pi or two has killed a card at some time because of this

[nix]

class101: NFS client tools are not present, but making them present is one pacman invocation away. The result works well enough that a sizeable fraction of my games are on NFS (the ones I don't imagine I'll ever want to play away from home). Many of them were originally installed on the Deck and then mv'ed away (over a wired link so I didn't have to wait too long).

(Of course this is pointless if you don't have an NFS server somewhere, but if you don't, I wouldn't mess around with samba: I'd just use sshfs.)

[Ben Bernanke]

I don't know what you're trying to do. You say that you find physically swapping USB easier, but you seem set on using your SD card over a network. If you can get a fat32 usbC then you can physically swap files between windows and linux. Here is an explanation of the file formats and why it's hard to share data:

Windows uses NTFS file format. Linux uses EXT4. I think deck internal os might be on btrfs but it looks like it formats data drives to EXT4 preferentially. Basically Linux can't work with NTFS and Windows can't work with EXT4 (at least one OS can read its non-native file system but I don't think either can write to it).

That's what the 3rd party apps do: they let windows read/write EXT4 and/or let Linux read/write NTFS. I've been burned by the apps in the past as they corrupted my data. I don't recommend them but maybe they are ok now. Think they're also kind of pricey (at least by Linux standards).

Both OS's (windows and linux) can read and write to FAT32 formatted drives. It seems to me that the easiest solution is to use an external HD/SD/USB drive formatted as fat 32 and drag the files physically between the 2 os's.

If you don't have anything other than an SD Card it might be possible to add a fat32 partition to it and just physically eject it and transfer files that way. If you're using the sd card to store steam games, the deck might not like the partition being there. I'm reading some reddit posts saying that you can use exFAT instead of FAT32 but I've never done that. I've always used FAT32. FAT32 doesn't support large individual file sizes so you can't really use it to store video, although this has not been a problem for me as I don't have video data.

If you want to transfer over a network, I can't be of much help because I've never set up a network (of any significance). I know SAMBA exists and you seem familiar with it. The other option is to install SSH on the deck and connect to it using the Windows machine using a program called PUTTY. I'm not sure how easy it is to get SSH running on the deck because Valve has done some things at the fs level that don't appear to be standard on arch. I also don't know the advantages/disadvantages of SSH/PUTTY v. SAMBA. I'm kind of guessing that if you use SAMBA you need to be concerned about file formats that windows can read where is you used SSH, I think the Deck would just use network protocols to stringify the files and send them to the Windows machine over its network card without Windows needing to be able to read the EXT4 but maybe I'm mistaken.

Sorry maybe you already know this stuff. Basically the options are:

(1) Physical Swap
(create partition on the sd card with fat32/exFat for file shares)
(make fat32/exFAT usbC drive)
(2) Network Swap
(using SAMBA somehow)
(using SSH/Putty,winscp somehow)

This is always such a mess that I just keep an old laptop HD with fat32 format on it and just use that for swapping files (the intermediary option).

[nix]

SSH is already on the deck and works fine :) there are even tools like ntfs-3g accessible through pacman that can both read and write NTFS, but I too am a little chary of them (among other things, they use FUSE to implement filesystems outside the kernel, and while FUSE is wonderful it is not terribly fast.)

[class101 [OLED deck]]

Yeah ntfs-3g is super slow. Nobody mentionned rsync too, very good tool it support local and remote transfers with a server.

I'd go with ssh or rsync as they are already installed in SteamOS

[nix]

Plus both ssh and rsync are massively widely used and enormously robust. You are *most* unlikely to encounter a bug.

[Ben Bernanke]

here is a video from ltt showing how to setup file transfer using ssh and winscp if anyone is interested.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pvEZELnbPoI

[Devin]

I believe that the SD card has limited write cycle hence not recommended for dual boot use by booting Windows off it as the card might eventually get corrupted. Instead use SSD equivalent HDD (e.g. IDE, SATA, SSD, etc. ) or better.

If you need to transfer large files, you can use the Warpinator. I've been using a NAS server using Samba share files between machines on the same local network and that seems to be easiest to do.

If you'd like to run a Kodi server, perhaps consider running it as a separate server (e.g. Raspberry Pi or old computer) with a storage media attached to it; and then you can access the files over the network using any devices using a client software/app. I'd use that approach rather than hosting the server(s) using the Steam Deck. For testing/temporary purposes, should be okay to use the Steam Deck as server (on main HDD) however for ongoing use, it would be better to host the server software on a separate machine.