How To Upgrade the SSD in Steam Deck OLED

hey I'm Tony cassera today I'm going to be showing you how to install or replace uh the SSD in valve's new steam deck OLED it's very similar to the old steam deck LCD but there is a little bit of a difference when it comes to the actual installation inside the deck so I just wanted to go through how I did it there's not really an official guide out there for this yet I fix it as the guide that I was using as sort of my starting point um but they don't cover how to deal with the added complexity of the wires now being glued to the back plat so I thought I'd show you how I did it now before we get started there's a couple things that I have here one is the case that the steam deck came in because uh I want to put it face down to protect the joysticks while we're doing this these are the tools that I'm going to be using this is a really cheap screwdriver Precision kit uh from Amazon they don't make this one anymore but there's one that looks exactly the same but orange it's linked down below this is a pry kit for my Fixit this is super necessary for helping to get this open you can also use a credit card if you don't mind it getting damaged but really I like to use this instead cuz it's a little bit thinner and safer it's like $9.99 on Amazon totally worth buying and I don't keep a magnetic screw holder thing I'm just I don't know I've never gotone around to buying one so I use a paper plate to keep track of my screws um you definitely don't want to lose them they're very small so at least just having like a paper plate with a raised Rim means that you're unlikely to lose them so before we actually even open this up we need to do uh something in the Bios to make sure that we don't accidentally uh enable our steam deck while we're opening it so first thing we're going to do is we're going to hold the power and the plus volume button together until we get into the bios so we go to setup we go down to battery storage mode but I'm going to bypass doing this because my battery is above 80% ideally you should work yours down below 80% before enabling this mode I'm just going to be extra careful I guess so I like to use the case that came with the steam deck uh so that the joysticks are properly supported hey everyone editing Tony here I just wanted to point out that leaving your SD card in your steam deck will make it pretty much impossible to pull the case apart as you're about to see about a minute from now in the video uh just go ahead and remove your SD card before you get started on this it'll make everything a whole lot easier now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to use a torque 6 size 6 bit if you're doing this a steam deck LCD you have to keep track of where each screw goes because the thread count is higher on some of the screws than the others because these are all now torque six I believe they're all the same length and thickness and basically when you're un screwing this you don't want to give it a lot of of uh of power just enough to get it released like I said use your paper plate if you don't have a magnetic pad to keep all of them in place okay now that we've removed all eight screws I'm going to move them to the side just because uh and then the next thing we're going to do do is we're going to open uh the steam deck so this is where the pry tools really come in handy here and we've got a bunch of these they're basically guitar picks this is what I like to use to open the steam Deck with so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to turn it on its side and basically where the case meets these bumpers up here this is a really good place to get access into the case so what I'll do is I'll slide uh this pick in here it's okay to go slow take your time with the you don't want to break it uh the plastic is pretty resilient uh okay so I did have to give it a little bit of extra pull without the pick big mistake big mistake do not make the mistake that I just made which is I left my SD card in here while I was doing this that may very well damage your steam deck and that may be why it was actually not coming off okay well it came off now we're looking at the open Steam deck here basically at this Point what you want to do is bring your attention to the back shielding plate here uh basically what we're going to do is remove this now in the old LCD you could just remove this and pull it off but note something we have this ribbon cable that is actually glued to this back plate so you can't remove this from it or you could but I don't recommend it what I would recommend doing is working around it uh there's also a little wire on the other side you want to work around that too we can use our same torque 6 screwdriver and you're going to see that there are three screws here one two wait where's the three right there and we're going to remove these putting on my paper plate one two and three I do think that they are all the same size but it's just not worth risking it just in case there's a slight difference and now at this point we're going to start was maybe one of the harder parts of this so we're going to uh pull this up this metal shield and you're going to see that like this little leg down here gets caught you're going to need to pull that up make sure that nothing is getting caught here as you pull it up um and the first thing we want to do is we want to disconnect the battery because we don't want this booting up while we're in the process of it so uh you can kind of pull it back there's this little tassel here I have tried pulling on it and I swear to God I feel like I'm going to pull the entire cable off of it without actually removing it from here you can also use like one of these little spudger tools to get into the groove Groove the plastic Groove there and give it a little pull just to loosen it and I can see it's already coming out go slow with this you don't need to rush you don't need to give it a lot of power either because you run the the chance of damaging something else inside of the machine here so just take your time breathe if it's getting frustrating take it just take a minute maybe walk away for a minute now when it is out you can just give it a pull and now the battery is disconnected now I'm going to let this hang out here and the next thing I'm going to do is free the SSD which is here behind the plate but this plate I can't move it's stuck so what I'm going to do is pull it up like this take our same Torx 6 screwdriver and I'm going to release the hard drive first before removing it so I'm going to do this I'm going to take the screw this one fortunately is very unique it's not going to be miss or sorry mistaken for any of the others and then we're going to just lift our plate here and we can basically slowly pull this drive out it has to be at an angle and then you'll see we have the hard drive right here everything from here is going to be pretty easy so what we're going to do is we're going to take the shielding off of our hard drive and we're going to get our replacement hard drive and we're going to put this back on top of it the way we found it which is the little top of the crown is going to go where the screw side is we're going to leave the flat side with the side that connects to the PCI coming back to our steam deck here with our replacement hard drive what we want to do is take the SSD and you're going to put it with the the single Notch bit off to the right and you're just going to slide it in there like this you can even push it down a little bit as you're attaching it that's fine and that looks good okay and now we're just going to bring this metal shield we're going to bring it back up and we're going to grab our screw from before we're going to push down the SSD with our finger make sure that middle shielding stays in place we can adjust it after we screw it in and we're just going to use this screw to put it down you don't need to tighten it very hard once it starts to uh give you resistance just give it like an extra quarter turn and that's it we we don't need to overtighten this it's totally fine uh perfect cuz what you don't want to do is strip the screw and you don't want to damage uh your motherboard but going too deep now what I'm going to do is I'm going to just shimmy this heat shield just a little bit further up here and then that's it that's it that's that's the hardest part now all we're going to do is close everything back up so uh before we do that let's replug in our battery uh which is very simple we just take it we push it here I use my fingernail typically but you can use the spudger if you want on the corners just give it a little push in don't push the actual wire ever there you'll get a nice snap you'll feel it's in uh it won't make a loud noise but you'll feel the connection now uh we need to reconnect so now you'll see that there are one two three screw holes and you'll notice also that there's another screw hole here and here these two you do not want to screw into those are for attaching this through the case screws that we're going to screw in at the end uh I accidentally did this when reattaching it I had to put the back on I had to take it off again it's it's a whole thing you don't want to do it um so let's take our three screws and put them back in the locations where they were so we'll start with our bottom left here you can do it in any order it doesn't matter and we'll do the top left and then I'm going to do this on the bottom right now this is where I said don't get confused there's this one with the little leg and then there's also this one that's just got a bare uh board on it so you can just do this and then you're good to go looking good okay next thing we're going to do we're going to replace the back of the case onto here so turn it around like so uh everything's looking good so we're just going to place it on pick it up and we're just going to pop it in it's all the way on and then the last part here is we just have to plug all over our screws back in so now when you're tightening these don't tighten them too much I already made that mistake with one of them and I've slightly damaged my case I'm very upset about it but learn from my mistake don't do that as you tighten it up you'll feel it start to give you resistance and that's okay at a certain point it'll feel like the screwdriver wants to stop on its own give it just an extra quarter turn and that's it now if you've already damaged your case like me it's going to be a little harder on the screws that were damaged because it won't give you the same kind of feedback and resistance so for instance here I'm basically where it should be but it's still loose so I'm just going until I start to feel any kind of feedback and I'm stopping because I don't want to damage the case any further as you're screwing these in you may notice that you're hearing a little bit more clicking from around the edge of the case that's just the little uh connectors for the front and the back of the shell coming together nothing to be alarmed of if they're small cracks now what I like to do is just go back give them just a tiny little like 1/8 turn just to make sure that they're all uh uh definitely in if it feels like you have to push hard that don't don't push hard yes beautiful okay hard Parts done all that you have to do on the last part and this is what we have our micro SD card for or you can use a USBC Drive is we need to now put in the steam recovery image which uh I have a link for down below and a guide that you can follow uh it's going to depend on which platform you're on I'm on a Mac you might be on a Windows or a Linux so they're not the same so I'm not going to go into detail here about how to create the image the instructions are very good though and once you have that and you have your SD card you just want to go ahead and plug this in and then the next time that you start your steam deck uh if you've done the battery mode you'll actually need to plug it into the power uh I didn't because my battery is above 80% uh so I'm just going to start it now what you'll do is you press the power button and the plus button again also the first time you start it again after plugging the battery in it may take a second as it re-energizes the board don't worry about it it's totally normal the next thing that you'll want to do is uh go to the boot manager and then uh what you'll basically be doing is starting with your uh SD card instead of the hard drive that's in there and then you'll follow the prompts to recover uh the Steam OS image it'll basically format the hard drive for you make it all work and after you've gone through all that you should have a functioning steam deck just sign in and start downloading games and playing thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to the channel and please leave a like below helps get this video to the people who need to see it most and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Tony Cassara

Views: 45,912

Keywords: steam deck, steam deck oled, steam deck oled 512gb, rog ally, legion go, handheld gaming, steam os, portable gaming, valve, windows, linux, gaming, video games, pc gaming

Id: RdPFlhA1Yu8

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023