Steam Deck production might be ramping up again but it turns out more recent orders could be something of a lucky dip, SSD-wise. Valve have quietly updated their Steam Deck tech specs page with a note that the NVMe SSDs in “some” 256GB and 512GB models might now use the PCIe Gen 3.0 x2 interface, meaning the drive has half the usual bandwidth of the Gen 3.0 x 4 SSDs that previously featured as standard.
As first spotted by German site HardwareLuxx, there's no indication as to why Valve made this change, and it doesn’t look like anyone with an outstanding Steam Deck order will know which SSD bandwidth they’ll get in advance. However, Valve's added note explains that “In our testing, we did not see any impact to gaming performance between x2 and x4.”