#waited until warranty was over to fuck with it too 😅 even though valve is really good apparently

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

It's easy, they said 😶

Changed the deck's ssd, and every step along the way was stressful enough I now have 5% more grey hair.

Stripped one of the screws. Guess my screwdriver sucked, but god is it hard to find clear instructions which size to use. (With the ifixit set, for me it was a PH1 for the backplate and a PH0 for the internal ones.)

Ordered a new set of bits, a screw remover set (which didn't end up working, but got it out with a tiny flathead instead), and a new set of screws. Together with the SSD, could have just bought the more expensive tier of the deck in the first place 😅

Prying the backplate off was stressful, omg. All the cracky noises. (Thanks to the ifixit video reminding me to remove the microSD, would have snapped it in half.)

"Just unplug the battery!" There was nothing "just" about it, googled, and wriggled, and pried, and wriggled some more, and scraped off some fingernail trying to get that damn connector out.

Meanwhile actually changing the ssd took like 1 minute.

Still haven't put the screws back in (wanted to see if everything works first). Might give it a few days and keep an eye on the thermals just in case.

I ended up buying an usb case for nvme ssds and cloned my drive. Didn't even need to install software, Linux does that with a single command. It worked perfectly fine, except that somehow, Steam has forgotten most of its settings, which really, small issue, but mildly hilarious. Yes, everything is still there, but here, have some beep sounds on menu navigation and all your emulated games forgot that they used to be in a collection.

Was it worth it? I think so.

I've owned the thing for 2 years now, so I am absolutely certain of two things: 1) it's worth the money and more b) 256 GB is too little space for me and sd cards won't be saving me.

The main reason why I wanted an upgrade is that one of my games performs terribly off the micro sd. It took several minutes to load into a map; quickly hopping in to kill a boss? Sorry, boss is dead now.

Unfortunately, that game is also 72+ GB and can't just be finished and uninstalled, so that's like 1/3 of the space permanently taken.

Also honestly, navigating two of each common and compatdata-folders for savegame hunting, mod installing or snoop-around-in-files-purposes is just a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure it works for those people who think changing a wallpaper is witchcraft, but I like mods/reshade and not every game I like supports cloud saves.