correct me if im wrong but you don't have to use this feature if doesn't suit you
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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Steam Hardware
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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
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Yeah, it's got 256GB or 1TB of internal storage, so you can just use the microSD card to move the game from i.e. the deck to the frame.
It's also easily user replaceable, it comes with the same smaller size m.2 as the steam deck, but will work with full size m.2 cards as well.
Does that go for the Frame as well? I've only seen this confirmed for the Steam Machine. But I could've just missed it.
Going by the store page, the frame is using UFS, aka a hardwired SSD.
Sorry, I don't actually know about the frame. I should have clarified I was talking primarily about the Machine.
Yeah you can use the internal storage and if you still wanted to copy the games across you can always do it over the internet (or LAN). I think Steam does have a built in way to do this now as well or you can just send it yourself as a file with rsync or what ever tool you feel like copy/pasting with.
You could also store your games on a NAS if you hate yourself (read/write performance will be pretty bad and result in a poor experience for most games)
Alternatively i can just download them on each device and have better load times?
At least the games i play are small enough (<150GB each). And i dont need more than few them, one is enough usually.
You consider 150GB small?!? The biggest games I have downloaded were around 80GB, and I found that excessive.
Anything over 35GB is luxury
I still find tf2 at 32gb enormous
Considering the amount of maps and models added over the years, I don't really find that enormous
I dont think it's small, but small enough so that several of them fit on the 512GB SSD
call of duty player, probably?
1 Gbit internet connections are not yet universal. And some parts of the world still have slow internet.
Yup! Sitting here on 70 down / 18 up, fastest money can by around here. If I’m going to play a game I haven’t downloaded yet I usually have to plan a day in advance.
Copy it over the network instead so its on the internal memory of both devices. Uses your fast LAN instead of slow internet.
Steam supports local network transfers, they added this feature a few months after the Steam Deck was announced.
Or if they implement a copy feature, move the SD card over and copy a game to internal, so you can more quickly transfer over a game without removing it from the SD card.
Steam also supports local file transfers for game downloads. Like if your PC has a game downloaded and you start to download it on your Deck, the Deck will ask if you want to download it directly from your PC. It means your download speed is primarily limited by your LAN and PC hardware, (which is probably at least gigabit these days), instead of whatever arbitrary speed cap your ISP has implemented.
But technically speaking, carrying an SD card across the house would likely have higher data speeds. The latency sucks, but the bandwidth is only limited by the size of the card and how quickly you’re able to walk across the house. Hell, if you have a stack of large hard drives and it only takes you a few seconds to walk across a small living area, your total measured bandwidth could be measured in tens of terabytes per second. There’s an old joke that a carrier pigeon flying across town with a stack of SD cards would have higher bandwidth than any modern network.
It's good for rural areas and areas without many internet options. Even my internet isn't really that bad, and it would still take a few hours to download a game that large. It would be convenient to just take an SD card from one device and put it into another.
I'm glad that they're thinking about these edge case scenarios. Valve is good about this- for example, I've never needed any of steam's accessibility options, but I'm glad they are there.
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Is there a Steam Frame community on the fediverse?
I think this one is the default. You could make one, though
Given the size of communities here, it might be better to start a steam hardware community, rather than a niche one that will surely have few contributors.
I believe you can't rename communities, if not, we could rename this one to steamhardware.
Edit: it's being proposed https://sopuli.xyz/post/36802780
The biggest problem with microsd cards is they're stuck in 2013, yeah microsd express technically exists but nobody produces cards so no OEMs are willing to support it (except Nintendo)
This is peak but at the same time i hate SD cards. Idk how to feel about it 🥀
My experience with playing games off an SD card in Steam Deck was... lackluster, shall we say (performance-wise).
I share your feelings about SD cards.
I've had issues with installing games being slow, but I don't think I've ever noticed any difference in performance during actual gameplay.
I hope someone make something tiny but as good as a SSD in future, SD cards are absolute shit. For me it doesn't even have to be as tiny as SD card, even a credit card sized memory is good
Uh that already exists, MicroSD Express. It’s essentially a PCIe Gen 3 x1 NVMe SSD under the hood
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There's already small NVMe drives the size of, say, four SD cards with up to 1-2 TB capacity. So it shouldn't be long I reckon.
Crazy, i hope that companies start to adopt them instead of SD cards soon
Xbox series s/x has ssds like this but they're pretty expensive. Not sure if the price is high because of the tech, the specs or the licensing
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My deck got a new hard drive and ate my SD. Which is my fault, but I just never bothered to get a new one. SD card load times were insane
It depends on the game. I typically don't do AAA games on my Steam Deck. So, most of my games go on an SD Card. The games that need lots of HD assets, I put on my SSD.
Wait, what do you mean ate it?
Not cloud. I love it.
on a deck for me a microsd is for old emulated games. Everything else I'm fine deleting and restoring over the local network from my desktop or from a NAS especially when I plug the thing straight into the router
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