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…
I believe Steam Deck officially supports only Micro SD cards. I used one for about six months and had no issues.
The way they advertised swapping SD cards between Deck, Machine and Frame they are surely working on external storage.
Plus, your stuff is definitely still there but just the mount point or something changed.
I know and that’s what’s frustrating.
I’d just want to be able to redirect the Deck towards it or copy it on another hard drive to see if the problem is hardware related.
Part of the issue is that Linux does not auto-mount connected drives unless specifically configured to. So every time you boot your Steam Deck, the drive is detected but not mounted.
Normally, you do this via the fstab file. I’ll admit I’m not sure how well that works with an external drive.
The Steam deck is portable first. So I assume they don’t expect you to dangle a drive off of it.
That said, I bet the Steam Machine will get them to rethink this, and hopefully the changes come to the Deck too.
Yeah you’re right about it being portable first.
I sold our Switch to justify getting it on top of my Playstation and my PC’s, so I’m not really using it thé right way as it spends a good amount of time hooked to a big screen.
Yeah let’s hope the Steam Machine is gonna bring more stability when it comes to external hard drives.
Haven’t really had issues with my SD card the past year+. Occasionally I need to transfer to the built in drive - but that’s more game specific for load/render speeds or issues.
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.
I think this is the right answer.
If the drive isn’t ext4 formatted, steam os won’t automatically mount.
Here’s a tool that seems to be able to do it for any drive: https://github.com/scawp/Steam-Deck.Mount-External-Drive
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.
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!
I have two ps5s (one at home and one at work), I have an external drive and I can only play PS4 games on it, PS5 games have to be moved to the internal hard drive to be played.
I do have a second internal hard drive in both and I can play PS5 games from those.
On my Steam deck I upgraded my internal drive and threw the original into a usb enclosure. I do not have enough installed yet to need an uSD card though.
What external storage are you using? Is it the same that worked so flawlessly on your PS5?
Because I’ve recently bought some M.2 SSD enclosures with a Realtek RTL9210B chip and those seem to be buggy in that the enclosure goes offline for a few seconds after some random time (hours to days).
And I only noticed it because of random disconnect notifications about the one I use for Time Machine.
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?
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)
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.
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.
