external hard drive

[day7326]

Can an external hard drive be used for storing games on the Steam Deck instead of an SD card?

[Ben Bernanke]

I think so. You might have to tell steam where the games are, though. Like I think Valve just has a script setup so that SteamOS looks for games on the SD card. Like it automatically mounts the SD Device to a certain point where the Steam gaming software looks for games.

You might have to tell steam specifically to look at the HD you're mounting.

I think external HD is actually a better solution than SD because data transfer speeds with a SATA-style SD external over USBC or 3.1 is going to be like 5-10 GBPS and that's faster than the SD card slot.

I think Valve is using the SD card by default because NVMEs were super expensive when Deck launched (coming down a lot now just a few months later). Basically they expect you to run the OS and maybe the primary game you play from the NVME and push ur library off onto the SD. And SD is super portable because this is a handheld.

If you can figure some way to carry an HD around it's probably a better experience. Linux can brick SD's also and SDs are expensive/GB storage. Whereas I got a 500GB SATA SD/HD for $25.

The official Valve dock has 3x USB 3.1 ports and you can daisy-chain hubs too.

[Ben Bernanke]

Maybe these links will help:

https://steamdeckhq.com/tips-and-guides/external-storage-steam-deck/

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/558747288217753613/

[day7326]

Originally posted by Ben Bernanke:

Maybe these links will help:

https://steamdeckhq.com/tips-and-guides/external-storage-steam-deck/

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/558747288217753613/

Thanks, I'll have a look at those links.

[[KAMI] RedWyvern]

As far as I know it can, but only Ext4 partitions will show up in Game Mode, which is a format Windows can't read.
If the external drive has such a partition or is formatted in Game Mode, it should work, but I have not tested this.

[notboxbot]

This was one of the things that was (according to Valve) added in the current Steam Deck OS 3.4 Update :

External drives formatted as ext4 are now automatically mounted and available for use in Steam

Note: I didn't test how well this works yet (I'm still on 3.3.2).

[Ben Bernanke]

Originally posted by notboxbot:

This was one of the things that was (according to Valve) added in the current Steam Deck OS 3.4 Update :

External drives formatted as ext4 are now automatically mounted and available for use in Steam

Note: I didn't test how well this works yet (I'm still on 3.3.2).

Thanks. That 2nd link I posted has some pretty involved stuff to get it to work. Was wondering if it was outdated.

[Ralf]

Originally posted by Ben Bernanke:

If you can figure some way to carry an HD around it's probably a better experience. Linux can brick SD's also and SDs are expensive/GB storage. Whereas I got a 500GB SATA SD/HD for $25.

If linux bricks SD's in the SD and SD's are expensive, why is a external SD for the SD instead of just an SD a better buy? Not sure why would anyone use slow HD for the SD instead of SD, the only place where HD is better than SD for game is the resolution, since HD(High Definition) is better that SD(Standard Definition).

[Pierre]

what do you mean by bricking the sd card? I am thinkin of getting another sd card to create an image in case the sd card has a problem again rather than saving it to an external hard drive. is this a good idea?