A Word of Warning for 64 GB Deckers

[LightyKD]

Heads up for anyone with a, or thinking about the 64 GB Steam Deck. Naturally you would think that installing a SD card or using external storage would solve the issue of lack of storage. Please note that every time you install a game onto a SD card, it's Proton and shader cache files are installed locally. For example. I have 32 SD cards worth of games yet my internal storage now has 30 GB worth of shader and Proton files. Keep in mind I'm using a 64 GB Steam Deck. It would be nice if you could just keep the damn shader and Proton files on the same install location as the game but who knows what the team at Valve is thinking. Oh well, I said what needed to be said. Feel free to discuss below!

 

[Taorn]

You could potentially create symlinks to your sdcards. Would be a bit cumbersome, as you have to do this for every game. This could also slow down your game quite a bit, depending on the random r/w speed of your sd cards.

 

[Xzi]

I mean yeah, I'd assume most people buying the 64GB model are doing it to install their own 2230 SSD...64GB is a very, very small amount of space these days. Win10 would gladly gobble up all of it on its own.

 

[Kioku]

I mean yeah, I'd assume most people buying the 64GB model are doing it to install their own 2230 SSD...64GB is a very, very small amount of space these days. Win10 would gladly gobble up all of it on its own.

It does. I've got a computer in a classroom I work in. It's got 64GB and it can't even update because Win10 takes up too much space.

 

[djpannda]

Heads up for anyone with a, or thinking about the 64 GB Steam Deck. Naturally you would think that installing a SD card or using external storage would solve the issue of lack of storage. Please note that every time you install a game onto a SD card, it's Proton and shader cache files are installed locally. For example. I have 32 SD cards worth of games yet my internal storage now has 30 GB worth of shader and Proton files. Keep in mind I'm using a 64 GB Steam Deck. It would be nice if you could just keep the damn shader and Proton files on the same install location as the game but who knows what the team at Valve is thinking. Oh well, I said what needed to be said. Feel free to discuss below!

I got a 1tb 2230 just itching to be installed when I get mine. Updating was always my plan ( still q2)

for anyone in the 64 club You can still get a 256ss 2230 for around 40$ if it becomes a problem and most people upgrading the Ssd are not running into any major problems

 

[subcon959]

It does. I've got a computer in a classroom I work in. It's got 64GB and it can't even update because Win10 takes up too much space.

It doesn't make sense to install Win10 over Win11 now anyway. I think my Windows folder is ~20GB (which is still too much for an OS but at least doable on 64GB).

 

[64bitmodels]

you could always upgrade the EMMC inside with an NVME SSD. at least i hope you can

 

[Chary]

Oh wow, didn't expect shader files to take up so much.

Luckily I've got a 400GB micro SD and plan to get a 1tb nvme for it.

 

[SG854]

Oh My God!!!!!

 

[LightyKD]

I mean yeah, I'd assume most people buying the 64GB model are doing it to install their own 2230 SSD...64GB is a very, very small amount of space these days. Win10 would gladly gobble up all of it on its own.

Windows 10 eats up half the drive.

 

[Xzi]

Windows 10 eats up half the drive.

It's taken as much as 100GB on my boot drive previously, for unknown reasons. Does seem they've fixed whatever bugs might've been causing that, but it's still about 45GB on my rig.

 

[LightyKD]

It's taken as much as 100GB on my boot drive previously, for unknown reasons. Does seem they've fixed whatever bugs might've been causing that, but it's still about 45GB on my rig.

After my install I was at 32 GB, I'm now down to 10 but I'm not sure if it's because of Steam or something else. Once I'm done setting up my SD cards I'll do some digging before I move onto emulation. I have 25 more cards to go. Just wish Valve's servers were a bit faster and that not every damn game needed as long as the download to verify the data.