So relatively new deck owner.

Got a deal on a regular Deck for pretty cheap. I didn’t opt for the 1TB SSD or anything like that.

I know that it’s a pretty easy hardware replacement for the SSD or the SD card.

I just have a couple questions:

  1. Does the cloning process for the SSD require specialized tools?
  2. do you notice a huge performance improvement on SSD compared to SD card?
  • TheMinions@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    3·
    10 hours ago

    Thanks for all the detail. My daily driver is currently a windows machine, but I have looked into swapping to a Linux system.

    I will keep this in mind and will very likely just get a new SSD. I have noticed some longer load times.

    Due to budgeting, I will like just reinstall and use the SteamOS recovery key. Only downside is setting up EmuDeck, Lutris, and Decky again.

    • Quibblekrust@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      On Windows, Macrium Reflect is really good for disk cloning. They used to have a free version, but not anymore. Instead, you can use the 30-day trial and get all the features. They specifically support cloning Linux drives intelligently. It doesn’t just go sector by sector, but that’s always a fallback for things like LVM (Linux Volume Manager), which it does not natively support.

      https://www.macrium.com/blog/cloning-and-imaging-linux-file-systems-39bffeaf6307

      External enclosures for NVMe drives are pretty cheap to help with the cloning. Now that I use Linux on my laptop, I simply took my Windows NVMe out of my computer and stuck it in an enclosure and it still boots off USB. That’s pretty handy. I bought a UGREEN brand one.

    • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
      2·
      8 hours ago

      If you can swing it, Sabrent makes some nvme enclosures for the 2230 size the deck uses https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-ne30 that are super reasonable price wise, https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-snveis for full size and is also super reasonable. What I did for mine and my partner’s decks upgrading from a 512 GB ssd, if you have drive space you could do with one enclosure. I use the old ssd as a removable drive now so it doesn’t got to waste.

      Ssd is the way to go for sure, SD card is nice to have but it’s very noticeably slower for some things, I tend to use it for emulators and games I don’t play frequently.

      • TheMinions@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        20 bucks is cheaper enough that I might do it. Setting back up all my emulation and tweaks again seems less fun than the first time.