this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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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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[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I have my microSD set to btrfs format, but it breaks auto mount every SteamOS update. I know there are ways to set it to automatically fix this, but I've been using a lazier option of just having a shell script to fix the fstab (file that tells the computer what to mount and where) that I run once after every steamOS update.

It's not a perfect solution, but it makes fixing it easy enough that I haven't looked into a permanent fix.

A similar setup would probably work for your external drive, basically after I had the microSD setup how I wanted it, I just copied it's fstab configuration line. The shell script just adds that line to the bottom of the fstab file when I run it, and then after a quick reboot all my games are back and everything works again.

[–] Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

You saved me by talking about the drive not auto mounting after updates.

It turns out my problem this time was different than the last time as it was just the disk not auto mounting.

In the end, restarting my Steam Deck was enough. What an easy to solve and stupid problem!