Can the Steam Deck read media from external drives?

[Bucky Seifert]

This will be something I'd like to know when the Dock arrives. If I plugged an external hard drive with media on it, would it be able to read it and play any media on it?

[Kietan]

Yes, provided the media/partition is correctly formatted to either Ext4 or ExFAT the Steam Deck should have no trouble accessing it.

Edit: it has no probs with anything.

[Bucky Seifert]

Originally posted by Kietan:

Yes, provided the media/partition is correctly formatted to either Ext4 or ExFAT the Steam Deck should have no trouble accessing it.

Awesome, thanks!

[darrenphillips666]

Yes it can, even from a windows NTFS formatted drive,
I use a NTFS formatted HDD all the time for transferring games from my Win11 gaming PC to my Steam Deck, to save me re-downloading them again for Steam Deck

Windows has issue reading Linux formatted drives
Linux has NO issue reading windows formatted drives

[FPCreator]

Just make sure that it is not ExtFat 3 as Steam’s preferred is the newer ExtFat 4 mentioned by Kietan.

[CameL]

i connected a external DVD drive/burner that plugged in to my usb c hub it worked A1.
i was able to copy my roms from disk to folder on desktop