This 1TB Steam Deck SSD costs just £64, making for an unusually cheap upgrade
A brand new contender that comes top in terms of value.
The launch of the new Steam Deck OLED seems to have prompted a major price cut on one of the newest contenders for the best Steam Deck SSD out there. The Fanxiang S700 has received a convenient 20 percent price cut from Amazon from its £80 retail price down to £64, which makes it the cheapest 1TB option in our rankings without any compromise on performance compared to options from bigger brands.
For reference, its read and write speeds of 5000MB/s and 4600MB/s respectively make it one of the quicker options, even if you will be limited to a little less by the Steam Deck's PCIe 3.0 interface. Even with that, it still represents quicker storage than either the built-in SSD or eMMC storage in the Steam Deck, depending on the model you choose. Getting 1TB of storage also makes this a big upgrade on any of the Steam Decks, especially over the base model 64GB option, which is now being discontinued, and can be picked up with quite a handy discount from Valve directly.
Of course, this is a drive that can be fitted to other handheld consoles such as the Asus ROG Ally, and that's given its smaller M.2 2230 size, which means it fits perfectly into the 22mm x 30mm drive bay size allowed in these smaller consoles. You can try and use this in a more conventional sized PC if your motherboard supports an M.2 2230 drive, although at this moment, the more standard sized M.2 2280 drives in PCIe 4.0 form are both cheaper and much more powerful.
The tricky bit here is installing the drive into your Steam Deck. Unlike with a standard PC, it's a bit more involved than opening your PC up and slotting a drive into the M.2 slot and booting from there. It's also a bit more involved than slotting in a MicroSD card into a dedicated slot in the side of the console. You'll need to carefully take the Steam Deck apart following this handy iFixit guide, which walks you through accessing the internals, carefully removing a heatsink, disconnecting the battery and swapping the drive. From here, you can use a USB flash drive to reinstall SteamOS. It is a little more fiddly largely due to the smaller sizes, but if you've got patience (unlike me) and a few tools you should be perfectly capable of the procedure.
£64 for a 1TB M.2 2230 drive to slot into your Steam Deck isn't too much money these days, and if you're looking for a drive to go in a Steam Deck you might have picked up on the cheap or the brand new Steam Deck OLED, this seems like the prime time to do so.