Solving Steam Deck Shader Storage with a 61.44TB SSD
Solving Steam Deck Shader Storage with a 61.44TB SSD
The toys in the StorageReview lab are extensive. In this piece, we look at…
The essence of this unconventional amalgamation lies in its absurdity. We chose the Solidigm P5336 enterprise SSD, offering a staggering 61.44TB capacity. While the capacity is amazing, it leverages an enterprise U.2 form factor, which is problematic given the Steam Deck’s M.2 slot. As such, an M.2 to external U.2 adapter from NFHK was employed as the bridge, paired with an Icy Dock enclosure to hold the drive.
Unnecessary modifications of the steam deck that make stationary? I could not resist posting this here ;) My question to all the steam deck fans out there: Would you be able to fill this 60 TB beast with games?
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No, I would not. I'm not sure anyone would be able to fill 60tb of games, that is roughly 600 100gb games?
I have a library of nearly 1,200 + 50 + free games from Epic (some duplicates - say another 50?) and I'm fairly certain all of them installed would only take up maybe 1/3rd.
I currently have 6tb of SSD filled with games (181 on steam + say 25 between other launchers) and 8tb of HDD storage (with 156 games downloaded). Let's call it an even 350games at 10TB, that would mean 60TB is 3,500 games of variable storage size (largest game is ~170gb most between 1gb and 25gb). If we throw in emulated games maybe we can add some ratio of games/gbs if that matters.
Bad estimate math but I think it's close enough for gauging just how many games one would need to own in order to fill up 60TB. That said, with shader cache maybe we'd be closer to the 2,000 game mark, with the rest of the space being used by shaders? Lol.
Now, I like having a lot of games readily available. It comes in use more often that people assume and it's nice having a curated selection of games available. However, I find that at just 1,000 games curating this list takes some time, deciding what game fits better on PC or handheld, if it's a game I'm even interested in, etc. So to own and actively curate triple the number of games... I'd need far fewer hobbies and far more time for gaming, lmao!
All this said, the realization that I could download my entire steam library onto a single steam deck... Now that seems enticing. However, I feel it brings along a new issue itself... Everytime you turn on the deck you will be waiting for hours as the shaders update, lmao!
Just imagine how long it would take if 100+ games are updating every time you turn on the deck. It would probably be pretty unusable in the main UI.
With my 512gb it took maybe 10 to 15 minutes last night after being offline for a couple weeks on a road trip. I could only imagine a list an order of magnitude larger...
That said, I do think the main UI is generally pretty okay when they're updating. The downloads page itself though would actually be unusable though I think, scrolling through a list of games that size would take so long, and each time you manually update something at the very bottom, it moves it and brings you back up to the top... yet another long, long scroll to queue the update for the next lmao!
It's a reason I disable updates generally