Western Digital just rolled out a new line of drives designed to help gamers get the most out of their Steam Deck or ROG Ally. The small M.2 2230 form factor drives come in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB options to significantly upgrade the storage on your handheld PC console.
The ROG Ally already comes with a hefty 512GB of SSD storage, while the Steam Deck has options ranging from 64GB to 512GB. But with the biggest new titles coming with equally huge file sizes — at roughly 150GB, Baldur's Gate 3 alone is taking up over half of my mid-tier Steam Deck's available storage — any gamer can tell you that space goes fast.
The act of replacing the SSD inside a portable PC console has never been the hard part (check out our guide on how to install an SSD on Steam Deck if you're interested). Rather, finding the itty bitty, M.2 2230 drives to fit into such compact hardware is the real challenge. You can find these drives inside Dell and Microsoft Surface laptops, but they're simply not sold to consumers in the same volume that SSDs fitted for PCs are.
Thankfully, that's beginning to change. As more Steam Deck competitors like the ROG Ally and AyaNeo 2S enter the space, manufacturers like Sabrent, Micron, and Corsair have expanded their offerings to include M.2 2230 drives. Framework even rolled out its own 2TB upgrade drive for Steam Deck earlier this year, as The Verge notes. For a tech giant like Western Digital to throw its hat in the ring is a good sign of how seriously Silicon Valley is taking the obvious appetite out there for handheld PC consoles.
“With game sizes continually becoming larger, it’s easy for handheld game consoles to fill up over time with new games and regular updates,” said Eric Spanneut, vice president of client SSDs for Western Digital, in a press release this week. “The new WD_BLACK SN770M NVMe SSD boosts available storage up to 2TB2 and is specifically designed to handle the peak performance of demanding games for handheld gaming PCs.”
The drives, which offer speeds of up to 5,150 MB/s based on PCIe Gen 4, are available now. You can snag the 500GB and 1TB versions from Western Digital’s online store for $74.99 and $109.99 respectively. Best Buy also has the 1TB option for $129.99, while the 2TB version is available there exclusively for $239.99.
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