Valve designer: No, seriously, don’t make this Steam Deck SSD mod

1 year 9 months ago

Also in Steam Deck news, Valve’s Lawrence Yang – a designer who worked on the on the handheld PC – has weighed in on a widely shared mod that replaces the pre-installed SSD with a larger, faster model. His advice: don’t do it.

The mod, by Twitter user Belly Jelly, swaps out the dinky default M.2 2230 SSD for a slightly longer M.2 2242 drive. It seems to mostly work fine except for making “the heat spreader bow a bit.” It was subsequently shared by PC Gamer, GameSpot and others before Yang tweeted a warning that such a change would “significantly shorten the life of your Deck” by moving thermal pads vital to cooling the charger IC (integrated circuit).

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Author
James Archer