Steam Hardware

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External storage on Steam OS is a problem (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz

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Hi everyone!

First of all, I wanna say that I love my Steam Deck and Linux. I'm spending 90% of my gaming time on the Deck.

That being said, the external storage situation on Steam OS is really shitty and it makes me understand why some people just stick to normal consoles.

I've been using external storage for years on Playstation and never encountered a problem which made me reinstall everything.

In around a month, it happened to me twice on Steam OS.

All the Steam games on my external drive just disappeared and Retrodeck tells me that (probably because of an update to Steam OS) it can't find my rom folders anymore.

Such things makes me look stupid when I'm trying to show my son how kind of "better" the Steam Deck is compared to my Playstation 5.

I've seen that Valve is saying that we shouldn't rely on external storage, but there is no real choice now that game are taking so much space and with only 256gb at my disposal in the Deck. I hope they'll improve this with the launch of Steam Machine as it'd be a big step toward an almost console like experience.

Would having an SD card be safer than an external hard drive in such situation?

Buying more internal storage is a solution that I'd want to avoid as it would only be usable with one device..

Edit: this time just restarting the Deck solved the problem as the disk wasn’t mounted. Last time, the disk was mounted but the Deck couldn’t find the right path towards my games..

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[–] iltoroargento 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I have an SD card and upgraded the small SSD in mine and it has been a game changer. I don't use my deck docked very often, so for portability, it's really necessary for me to upgrade internal storage options.

I've never dedicated external storage for the deck and have only used external SSDs to transfer files. I remember earlier on, there was a file path issue where it would duplicate libraries on my SD card so the games would still be there, but unread/wouldn't show up and I'd have to manually change the path back again in desktop mode. I'm pretty sure that's a thing of the past, though. Is that what's happening with your external drives?

[–] Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Well I wrote the message in anger after discovering that my games had disappeared again, so I haven’t spent much time investigating😅

Last time, in « storage » in Steam OS the hard drive would still appear, the space occupied by the games would still appear, but the games were nowhere to be found.

In desktop mode, I’d easily find them, but there was no way to show Steam OS the path to these games again.

I’ve tried many workarounds found on the web, but none worked.

I ended up reinstalling my whole library. But now it’s the same thing with Retrodeck on top (although retrodeck might be easier to just move as you can change the path to games)

[–] iltoroargento 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, that sounds like what was happening with my SD card. I followed a guide to path it correctly, but even that didn't work for a little while (which led me to upgrading the SSD). I think an update fixed the SD library snafu, though, because I haven't had that issue for the last six months, at least.

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 months ago

The way Valve set up the Deck is that the only storage initialized is the internal SSD and the SD card in big picture mode (home menu) which makes sense if you're playing on the go - you're not going to hold an external HDD in your offhand on the plane lol.

I believe using the dock doesn't have any impact on how the Deck handles drives either, the official FAQ mentions it's more akin to "plugging an external USB hub", so that won't solve the automount issue.