Steam Machine SSD Upgrade: What Fits and What It Costs

Why the length matters more on the Steam Machine than on the Steam Deck

The Steam Deck takes one length of drive: iFixit's Steam Deck guide describes a single-sided M.2 2230, the short card built for handhelds and thin laptops. That market is smaller and its drives cost more per terabyte, which is simply the price a Deck owner pays to upgrade. The Steam Machine is a desktop-sized box, and iFixit's guide describes a slot that accepts either the short 2230 card or the full-length 2280 card most desktop drives are built on.

If that holds for your unit, the practical effect is that a Steam Machine owner is shopping in the much larger 2280 market, not only the 2230 one. On our catalogue today that means the difference between a few dozen drives and well over a hundred, and between the handheld market's prices and the desktop market's. We measure what that is worth, drive for drive, on the 2230 vs 2280 page.

Valve's own spec page does not state either length, which is why we attribute the claim to iFixit on every page rather than present it as Valve's. If Valve publishes a length specification, we will cite that instead.

How we choose which drives to list

A drive appears on this page only when our catalogue holds its M.2 length, and that length is 2230 or 2280. Most M.2 listings on Amazon never state their length at all, or bury it; a drive whose length we have not recorded is left out and counted above, not assumed to be 2280 because most drives are. The same rule governs our Steam Deck page, and it is the only way a fit claim stays true.

Drives sold with a factory heatsink are left out as well. iFixit's guide does not describe a heatsink or a clearance figure for the Steam Machine's drive bay, and a thick heatsink is the usual reason an otherwise compatible drive does not physically fit a small chassis. If a clearance figure is published by Valve or measured in a teardown we can open, we will add a heatsink table with that figure beside it.

We state no PCIe generation requirement. Valve publishes none, iFixit's guide names none, and the one teardown claim we found was reported second-hand. The table prints each drive's PCIe generation only where the listing itself states it.

Every price is live, one row per drive at its cheapest in-stock offer, with its condition shown. The verdict badge compares each drive with its own recorded history, never with a list price; our Steam Machine SSD deals page sorts the same drives by verdict.

Replacing the drive

iFixit rates its Steam Machine SSD replacement guide "Moderate" with an estimated time of "30 minutes - 1 hour". Follow iFixit's guide+SSD+Replacement/225213) for the procedure itself - we link it rather than restate it, because a repair procedure copied out of its source goes stale the moment the source is corrected.

Before opening anything, back up what matters and check Valve's own support pages for anything the warranty says about self-service storage changes; we have not sourced a Valve warranty statement on this and do not state one.

If you only need room for a few more games, adding a microSD card is the other route Valve built in. We have not yet established whether the slot is UHS-I, UHS-II or microSD Express, and the right card differs completely between those, so we do not recommend one yet.

Choosing a capacity

Size the drive by the games you actually keep installed, not by the size of your library. Using publisher-stated installs, three of the largest games on our list together take 430GB - most of a 512GB drive before the operating system is counted. Our how-much-storage page works through 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB against those figures.

Capacity is also where price per terabyte usually improves: larger drives in the same line tend to cost less per terabyte, though not always, and the table above prints each drive's figure so you can see where the step flattens today.

Steam Machine or Steam Deck: the two upgrade paths

Both of Valve's machines let you replace the internal drive, and both use NVMe. What differs is the length the slot takes and therefore the market you buy in. Our Steam Machine vs Steam Deck page prices both upgrade paths at the same capacities, live.

Frequently asked questions