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Upgrade your Steam Deck with this 1TB Sabrent SSD for £109/$103

May brings big discounts on 2230 PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

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Deals by Reece Bithrey Contributor
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Usually if I'm recommending Steam Deck storage, it more or less comes in the form of the best Micro SD cards for Steam Deck, which have dropped in price repeatedly. It's also possible to install a (bigger) NVMe SSD in the Deck though, maximising the amount of fast storage space available, and today we have a great deal on a perfectly-suited 1TB Sabrent Rocket 2230 drive.

Today the Sabrent Rocket 2230 costs £109 from Amazon UK with code EZZHFG9P, down from its UK RRP of £150. For the Americans in the audience, the same drive is also discounted to $103 at Newegg with code SSCSA536, down from its previous list price of $160.

Use the EZZHFG9P code at checkout to get this price - here's what it should look like.

Anyways, enough pricing talk - let's talk product. The most striking thing about this Sabrent Rocket drive is its smaller M.2 2230 form factor, which makes it a perfect choice for devices like the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally and some laptops, tablets and mini PCs as well. However, we'll focus on the Steam Deck as this is the most likely upgrade candidate!

Adding a fast 1TB drive makes this a capacity and speed upgrade over every configuration of the Deck currently available, but it's especially potent for the entry-level 64GB Steam Deck which uses slow eMMC flash storage that maxes out at around 300MB/s. Installing the 1TB Sabrent drive into the empty slot therefore nets you more than a 10x boost in both capacity and speed - while costing more than £100 less than buying the 512GB Steam Deck!

Image credit: Sabrent USA | Image credit: Sabrent USA

If the Sabrent Rocket name seems familiar, then that's because it's also one of the best gaming SSDs money can buy in its full size M.2 2280 configuration. This smaller version isn't much different when it comes to speeds, offering sequential speeds of up to 5000MB/s and random speeds of up to 800K IOPS. It is worth noting as this juncture that the Steam Deck's PCIe interface is limited to 3.0 speeds, but we'd still expect to see very strong read results - around 3500MB/s and 450K IOPS - that eclipse the default 512GB drive, which we measured at 2300MB/s and 110K IOPS.

The only fiddly bit with this Sabrent drive is going to be installing it, which requires removing a heatsink, disconnecting the battery and swapping the drive. From here, you can use a USB drive to reinstall SteamOS. This isn't as easy as installing a Micro SD card, but it's still a fairly straightforward process with a great guide available on iFixit.

It's pretty damn rare that we see discounts on SSDs that are capable with the Steam Deck, especially given there are so few of the things around. It's definitely a deal worth biting on therefore if you want to grab a Steam Deck-compatible SSD for a lot less.

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