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…

  • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    7·
    20 hours ago

    The steam deck doesn’t auto-mount external hard drives (you can confirm this by going into desktop mode and seeing the prompt to mount and browse the drive contents). Normally, SteamOS only initializes the internal SSD and the SD card currently inserted (if it’s in the file format that SteamOS expects, they provide a tool in settings).

    You could purchase an SD card, place it in the slot, change over to Desktop mode, mount your external drive, and then copy your games over using steam (it’s even a feature outside of SteamOS - offline transfer between storage). That would probably be the best option.