Two Steam Deck upgrades worth doing - Internal SSD upgrade and Dbrand skins!

hello this is the provoked prawn and I upgraded my steam deck and I'm going to show you how you can too now I might have a buttery smooth voice but don't convince you that this is going to be an easy task because it isn't however it is well worth doing now in this video I'm using the Corsair mp600 and some treats from dbrand that I'll get to later on and I'll leave everything that I used it linked in the description so you can find out more but I want to show you the steps for this process essentially what I'm doing is taking a 256 gigabyte steam deck and upgrading it for a one terabyte drive from Corsair the mp600 mini is obviously aided drive that's designed because it's the right size to fit perfectly in a steam deck and of course they're asked if we're interested in doing a video on this and I thought why not because one of the problems with the steam deck is the size of the internal storage now obviously you could buy a Micro SD card and I'd highly recommend doing that if you're not interested in upgrading steam deck as I'm about to but having internal storage is obviously better because it's faster potentially and also just gives you more because if you're combining a one terabyte drive internally and then a one terabyte for example micro SD card you've got loads of Rim but what I found was a 256 gigabyte internal drive fills up far too easily now the process for actually upgrading your steam deck and swapping at the nvme drive is fairly straightforward I'll link to a couple of articles in the description from iFixit which talk through the steps for this you can see some of it in the background here I've shortened the steps because I'll be honest it took a long time it took me several hours to get this done and it is also fiddly and nerve-wracking I'll be honest because you have to be very careful obviously you don't want to break anything you've got to tease the back off as you can see so there's multiple screws to remove at start and then use various different plastic Clips to basically pull the thing apart very gently taking great care now I've used my fix it kit that I happen to have already anyway and it's a screwdriver set but it also comes with these extra things like this pick that you can see me using here and then a plastic lever you need to take various screws out remove the back plate then tease off this aluminum foil at the back here to access another screw taking care with every step of the way because obviously there's a battery at the rear here and you don't want to damage any of the internal components I'm also standing on an ESD mat so make sure you haven't got any electrostatic discharge potentially destroying my steam deck because that'd be less than ideal and then removing all these screws and the back Parts here to be able to access the nvme drive now it is an NVM Easter it's fairly straightforward in order to swap out but you can't just use any L1 standard nvme drive that would fit in a PC usually in a gaming PC is too long so you need the right size this is a smaller Drive which is why this mp600 mini is ideal for this use because you'll see that it's a very small space and it's really tiny the first step here is also to remove the battery because obviously important we don't do any damage to the system and Val was actually really cleverly designed this with a little pull tab on it so you can just tug it out which is really nice so I will say from these few steps that you will see that some of these parts are really easy to do then you need to use the screwdriver to remove the M2 screw down the bottom here and then just tug out the pre-installed M2 drive now it's worth noting obviously this has all my games on it but also the Steam OS so I am going to lose all that however I will show you the process for what you do to sort that out and to reinstall it and it's fairly straightforward with some caveats now this has a ESD shielding on it so it's important that you keep this silver shield to protect the drive from being fried so I'm going going to replace it with the mp600 mini which as I said is a one terabyte drive in this instance and this will essentially give me quite a big upgrade but this is a blank drive with nothing on it and then you've got to recover the process of putting the cover back on which was fiddly let me tell you I've shortened a lot of the steps in this because they took ages and if I left the full footage in here it would have been about an hour long and you would have been bored and left by now but you can see that then you basically just repeat what you just did in reverse order so push the drive back in once that covers on and re-screw it down plug the battery back in put the protective cover back on put the screws back on and then put all the screws back on the case itself now be careful because the screws are all different sizes so if you are going through this process make sure you put them in a logical place where you can easily find the right ones for each of the different parts because there are different length screws different size screws and you may also need a different size Phillips head screwdriver bit as well the iFixit kit that I use for building PCS is really handy for this build process because I had the right bits in there as well as the little plastic Clips taking things apart so I'll link to that in the description because it's a really handy kit that I'd highly recommend anyway because I use it for all my PC builds and just for doing this process it was really great as well in various different ways now the back of the steam deck is going back on now and just putting everything back the way it should have been including the aluminum foil cover over that screw because you don't want to short any out during this process or leave anything in a position where it could get damaged when you start to use your steam deck this is my own personal sting take that paid a lot of money for on weighted ages for so I really didn't want to ruin it just for the sake of upgraded internal storage however I found that it was all right it actually Clips together really nicely and unclipped really nicely a nice quite pleased with myself I didn't manage to damage anything because I'm very impatient and heavy-handed and clumsy so the fact that I managed to do this shows that Val's done a good job of building it in a way that's actually possible to take apart pretty easily so you can maintain it yourself then it's just a case of putting all those screws back in now as I said already again earlier you want to make sure that you put the screws back in the right place you'll notice the ones in the middle here around the valve logo for example have smaller holes than the ones on the outside they are a different size and length so it's just worth keeping that in mind just take care if you are doing this to make sure you put them back in the right place now that's all the hardware level Parts done and that was relatively straightforward although I've shortened some of the steps if you follow the guide from iFix equals see how you do it and you've obviously seen some of it in the video here but there's no point in me going into the full length of the entire thing now if you go over to the steam deck recovery instructions you'll find instructions on how to download Steam OS because we need an image of that on a USB thumb drive which we can then insert into the steam deck and essentially boot from that to then go through the setup process it recommends using this Rufus software which you can download and I'll leave links to all this in the description you then need a USB drive that you can use Rufus to format and then apply the iso image from Steam into it so you can see the steam date recovery file for example you basically go through this process in there select it from your downloads and then start the process Rufus takes quite a while to format your thumb drive and get it ready for this process I will note and it took about half an hour now this is a point where I want to tell you that this was possibly the hardest bit of the entire thing which is insane because it seems like it should be easy but what I found was the drive I was using just didn't work and Rufus should work in theory but what I found was after half an hour I used that drive and then I had problems with it I'm going to show you why but I have an adapter that connects to a USB port so this is USBC on one end and USB a on the other and if you're lucky enough to have one of these then you can just insert your drive into that adapter and then plug it into the steam deck then what you need to do is hold the volume down and tap the power button until it beeps and then it will come on and then in theory it's meant to try and boot from that Drive via a menu system but what I found is that drive just wouldn't work I tried four different thumb drives and none of them would work and in the end I gave up and I used this USB SSD from Corsair as well which I'll also link to in the description I formatted that and put it on there instead followed the same process I use Rufus but it's on an external SSD rather than a USB and it is possible to do this and this is actually easier because you'll notice it's USBC on one end to USBC on the other end it connects right up to the steam Deck with these no adapter needed because obviously you don't have a USB a connection on there and then you just go through that process and then you click to re-image your steam deck so you're basically reinstalling Steam OS it gives you a warning that will wipe any data that's on there but obviously we don't have any data that's on there there's nothing on the drive is blank so it's fine we're basically going through the installation process to install Steam OS as a straight install now obviously this took some time it took ages to do this which was a pain as well but then you get to the process of basically setting up your steam deck as it was when you first got it and you've got the login screen I'd highly recommend using steam girl on your phone by the way to scan that QR code to shorten the login process because that makes life a lot easier and then once you've got there you've got to then re-download all your games so there's one downside but if you go into the settings you can go to the storage section just to make double sure that you've actually got the amount of space that you're expecting from your mvme drive which I can happily confirm I now have so I've just got over just 900 gigabytes next dbrand sent over a while back the kill switch setup from them which is basically a case for your steam deck which has a kickstand and other things on it but if you're in the know you will know that there's a problem with this setup where if you have a certain fan in your steam deck then you can't use it and I happen to have that fan in my system it's a Delta fan which means there's a problem with the magnets on the back of the kill switch case which can basically slow the fan down and then lead to overheating problems it's something that they're working on I'll link to the Reddit discussion around it because it was a big thing about it at the time it's quite a few months ago I've had this in my office for a while I thought while I had the steam deck apart I'd check in see which fans I have to see if it could actually work unfortunately it won't I'm not going to take the risk but it is a nice thing in theory it's a nice Hefty case with a kickstand on it you also get some thumbstick caps that'll go over it and a skin as well now and I can use the skin without a problem and I thought well it's a good excuse now while I'm doing this to use that skin because it is pretty nice so it's basically a view of the internals of the steam deck now dbrand has a really nice video guide on how to install this so I'm not going to show you the exact process for it all the way through but basically you just need to seat it down over the top and Veer it's really easy but again I'm really clumsy and I often find that I struggle with this sort of thing even grip tape and mice can be a problem sometimes but you can see like the speaker venting the obviously the the bottoms and all everything else it's already had cutouts on it so it's fairly easy to line up fairly straight the problem areas are going to be the top and right hand side where you have to basically get it to go around the edge edge of the steam deck they recommend using a hair dryer to do this because you can warm it up so that you can manipulate it so you then don't have creases in it so I went through this process and this actually didn't take very long at all and I was pleased with how it came out I think it looks really nice you've seen from that short at the beginning and I see the full finish thing in a minute but what you can see is it really sort of nice aesthetic to it there's actually two different variations of this skin as well it comes in gloss or matte versions I chose the matte one because it kind of goes with the matte look of the steam deck as it is anyway as a stand at standard out of the box so I thought it was pretty nice but it adds a nice sort of a personalization to it now dbrand has loads of other skins that are available on their site as well and it's worth noting that the kill switch also came with like a glass screen protector and other things so if you do purchase the kill switch they are working on a newly improved version to account for the fan differences in the steam deck so it's worth bearing that in mind but you always see that you have various different things in included with it and options so you can customize it there's obviously a skin for the trackpad as well so you can see that's got a pretty nifty finish and basically looks like you can see the internal workings of the entire thing you have it for the right and left sides so you end up with a really nice finish overall on it and now I've got a steam Deck with upgraded storage and improved looks so if you want to do the same to yours check out the links in the description to the products that I used as well as the steps for doing all these so you can find out in detail what you're meant to do you've made it right to the end of the video you brilliant Legend you if you've enjoyed it click that subscribe button give me a thumbs up and drop me a comment down below if you've got any questions if you really enjoyed it consider joining the channel and see the benefits of doing so check out these other videos you might well find them interesting or useful and most importantly have a great life

Channel: The Provoked Prawn

Views: 10,488

Keywords: Provoked Prawn, The Provoked Prawn, Steam Deck Upgrade, Steam Deck SSD Upgrade

Id: sONOWXU8Ezs

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023