News Valve Halves Steam Deck SSD Bandwidth on Some Models as Production Doubles

[Admin]

Valve has made a new change to the Steam Deck's original specifications, and is now allowing either a two-lane or four-lane NVMe SSD, which will reduce storage bandwidth on some models.

Valve Halves Steam Deck SSD Bandwidth on Some Models as Production Doubles : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Sounds like a way to draw a lawsuit, and to prevent user upgrades...

 

[Foxlum]

This is just bad form on Valve's part, as it severely kneecaps any chance of improving storage performance on the users part.

 

[cryoburner]

Considering everything from a low-end SATA SSD to a high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD offer very similar performance at loading today's games (and most other desktop tasks) this isn't likely to matter much.

Sounds like a way to draw a lawsuit, and to prevent user upgrades...

This is just bad form on Valve's part, as it severely kneecaps any chance of improving storage performance on the users part.

They're just using a different drive that has an x2 interface. That shouldn't affect potential upgrades in any way, and it doesn't sound like the x4 interface supported by the system will be changing, just the drive.

 

[anonymousdude]

Sounds like a way to draw a lawsuit, and to prevent user upgrades...

It sounds like they're just changing the drive it ships with. Not the actual physical link. Lawsuit maybe. Winnable lawsuit, probably not. They did straight up tell you that they're changing it. It honestly sounds like a supply chain issue for me and this is what they could source. They did announce that they doubled Steam Deck production per week so I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was the compromise.

This is just bad form on Valve's part, as it severely kneecaps any chance of improving storage performance on the users part.

Not too sure your average user or ever power user would particularly care or notice. Gaming as of right now doesn't hit storage all that hard and if you're on an ssd game load times aren't meaningfully different. The important part is that you're on an SSD.

 

[garlicky]

Sounds like a way to draw a lawsuit, and to prevent user upgrades...

Exactly what damages would you claim for the lawsuit?

 

[Old Molases]

But why on earth would they do thiss??

 

[digitalgriffin]

Valve has made a new change to the Steam Deck's original specifications, and is now allowing either a two-lane or four-lane NVMe SSD, which will reduce storage bandwidth on some models.

Valve Halves Steam Deck SSD Bandwidth on Some Models as Production Doubles : Read more

Was that testing on the x2 / x4 lanes done on a mostly full drive or < 1/2 full drive? SLC cache is a thing that shrinks with available space left.

 

[cknobman]

Sounds like a way to draw a lawsuit, and to prevent user upgrades...

How does this prevent you from doing user upgrades?

 

[junglist724]

Was that testing on the x2 / x4 lanes done on a mostly full drive or < 1/2 full drive? SLC cache is a thing that shrinks with available space left.

Not really important when the CPU is a low power quad core. When I'm installing games on my deck it's basically pinned at 100% cpu usage and never exceeds 90MB/s of disk activity even when docked and on gigabit ethernet. Game loading is CPU bottlenecked too.

 

[Thunder3000]

SSD speed scales with the number of NAND chips, because the drive can write to (and hopefully read from) all the NAND chips simultaneously. A 4TB SSD usually has 64 chips or less. A 512 GB SSD? Probably 4 or 8. Hard to saturate the bus with that. There are also power considerations to lighting up too many NAND chips at once. Bottom line is that Valve is probably 100% right, it doesn't matter.

 

[thisisaname]

If it makes no difference in game load times and performance of the deck then tell people what they are getting.
It is the lack of information that will upset people more.

 

[escksu]

But why on earth would they do thiss??

Cost and diversify on supply chain. So that they will not be constrained by lack of SSDs.

Anyway, 2x or 4x PCIE makes no difference to these SSDs. They are mostly low end DRAMless SSDs geared towards low power and cost instead of performance. Some are even single chip solution with controller and flash memory all in 1 package.

 

[escksu]

Sounds like a way to draw a lawsuit, and to prevent user upgrades...

If there is a lawsuit, it should to sue nvme drive manufacturers instead... Those write performance quoted are only when its writing to SLC cache. Once it exceeds the cache, write speed drops tremendously.

 

[hannibal]

Sounds like a way to draw a lawsuit, and to prevent user upgrades...

Most likely to prevent overheating that would cause problems too...

 

[RedBear87]

Considering everything from a low-end SATA SSD to a high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD offer very similar performance at loading today's games (and most other desktop tasks) this isn't likely to matter much.

It isn't likely to matter much now. On Windows things should begin to change from the end of this year with DirectStorage finally appearing, I'm not sure how long before it impacts Linux gaming as well, but sooner or later this decision will bite them back in that place.

But why on earth would they do thiss??

Probably they can't source enough M2. 2230 PCIe Gen 3 X4 drives, it wasn't a very common form factor to begin with, I suppose that accepting X2 drives from other manufacturers allows them to increase production.