Integral Steam Deck SSD Upgrade
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Throughout the life of video games, the storage media has changed often. But in recent years no matter how you bought it, installing has become mandatory. When it comes to modern gaming, storage is paramount. No matter if all digital, all physical or the likely middle ground. If you have a PC or console from the past 10 years or more, installation is a necessary evil. But until this generation it has mostly been size that is important, with the SSD boom, now we feel the need the need for speed.
With the recent surprise Steam Deck OLED update at the end of last year, one thing can still be lacking and expensive, that SSD inside. The costs scale heavily from the 256gb base model to the expensive 1TB model, but can you get better size, speed and value from a 3rd party upgrade. UK manufacturer Integral have decades of experience in PC and console hardware, and they sent me their Gen 3 1TB SSD for the Steam Deck, although they also offer a Gen 4 model and larger 2 and 4Tb options, including PS5, PC, Mac, and laptop upgrades.
The drive itself is neat and tidy with a simple PCIe connector that fits the deck perfectly, but can be used in many laptops, Tablets, handhelds with a suitable socket. Prices range from £35 to £69 for this 1TB model, read and write speeds of 3.4GBs and 3GBs respectively. Putting it above the base Steam Deck SSD, in addition the 1Tb model here swapped with the Base 256gb LCD Steam Deck will offer the same storage & potentially better performance than the Oled 1TB model for significantly less and certainly over the 256GB base model, let’s put that to the test.
Driving things forward
The first hurdle is we need to pop open our Steam Deck and replace the internal but modular SSD. Remember this is going to void any warranty and is at your own risk, but it’s simple and the Steam Deck is not going anywhere soon. Ensure you have a clean space to work, storage for the screws, something to protect the screen when face down and earth yourself and desk before you start.
1) Shutdown the Steam Deck fully
2) Pop out any SD card
3) using an M1 screwdriver, remove the 6*9 and 6*5 screws from the back holding it together. Place all screws in a small storage tub noting the longer 9mm on the outer and shorter 5mm on the inner.
4) The with a plastic phone prying tool, gently push the clips apart and work along the unit. Take care around the triggers and power buttons to apply even but not heavy force, it will easily just pry off as you go.
5) Once off you can now access the heat/interference shield with the warranty screw cover by foil tape. 3 screws later and lift off is achieved revealing the small M2 drive.
6) Final screw removed wool then pop the old drive up, simply pull out and place in storage with or close to your screws.
7) The new integral drive comes with heatsink on top and simply clicks in aligned to the socket and pushes down and secured by the same screw.
8) Now reverse the dismantle guide with shield screws, noting the aligned caddy holes that go through outer case and sandwich it all together.
9) now align the rear cover into place and push around the frame starting from one side and working around clockwise or anti-clockwise. Push gently until its clicks together simply.
10) Finally external screws using the balanced top left, bottom right, bottom left top right, Centre approach to assure even pressure and stability.
Here you need to reinstall the Linux OS and then SteamOS to resume gaming. Simply go to Steam and download the re-image file from their site and grab a USB drive, min 8GB and using either the noted windows or Linux tool decompress the image onto the USB to make a bootable drive to resume.
Hold down the volume down and power button with the Steam Deck in a caddy with the USB inserted, or a suitable USB A to USB-c converter into the USB-C port. If not in a caddy, ensure your Steam Deck is fully charged before you start. However, I recommend a caddy so you can have it powered throughout and leave the USB stick in the caddy port. It will boot from drive or if you enter the boot menu chose your USB as the boot sector. The Pacstrap install script will run and take approx. 20 mins to boot you into Arch Linus Distro OS, here choose the reinstall Steam OS icon and the allow this to run. Once complete, it will prompt a reboot, choose yes and the pop out the USB. The Steam Deck will reboot to the Steam OS welcome as per factory shipped, setup Wi-Fi, accounts, login, and you will now see a clean install with no games. Popin your SD card and games will be ready to play, and you can redownload or pull from your local pc if active to save time and bandwidth, a god send for me.
We are now good to test stock drive to the upgrade and see the benefits it offers over that 4x storage increase. Theoretically, we have almost 80% higher read speeds than the stock drive, so the potential is high. My methodology is simple, with some caveats and limits on the increases we will see. The specific boosts offered here are data seek, latency and ultimately bandwidth, which can improve loading, streaming and even performance. I ran 3 tests of loading or fast travel on the Stock drive and then the upgraded Integral drive. Of the 3 I took the fastest result and compared these to each other, this gives us a higher level of accuracy on the results and the likely best-case scenario.

Playing the game
Newer games and certainly UE5 and Sony first party titles will likely see the biggest gains and that is True with Spider-Man Remastered. Giving us a minor 2.5% increase, nothing really of huge merit and in reality, would not likely be noticed by most players.
Taking a fast loader in Resident Evil Village we see our first gain, albeit minor. Just under 1 second faster gives us nearly 10% improvement over the stock drive, hardly something to shout about but certainly an increase in favour of the integral drive.
Older games are likely not going to be limited by the drive itself and with MGSV we see this come to fruition with the stock drive being slightly faster, but within 2 frames so margin of error. The same was true for a few other older titles that were close to identical, edge cases may crop up but expect old games to benefit little with a faster drive.
The Biggest of all, by far, was Insomniac’s SSD punisher Rift Apart. Just over 49% increase cutting the load down by approximately 3 seconds compared to the stock drives 6 seconds. Another new title that demands an SSD is Motive’s Dead Space Remake from EA giving us a delta just over 2 seconds but a smaller 18% gain to the Integral drive. Bringing the average boost for the new drive to circa 10% increase, not bad and far more than I had expected. What it does show though is the results and gains will differ on a title-by-title basis, but many big loading games may see significant gains and as my graph shows these can be small to medium size improvements.
So, what about performance gains then, well we are limited but 2 games spring to mind for testing and we again lean on the sleepless developers. Running through the portal rift run across both drives at Low settings, we see a gap open early on over the stock drive. Using the 2nd run for each as this was the fastest to complete for both drives overall. Performance is better on the Integral drive due to a more consistent data feed we can hit a brief 60fps whereas the Stock drive only hits 47fps due to still streaming and decompressing data. The average ends 15% faster over the integral drive, although the 3rd run on the Factory drive was slighter faster and only 10% slower on average fps, but slower to complete the run, and this is where the drive boost comes in. We see portals opening quicker and the void dimension sections being shorter. The performance is higher as the data is being streamed faster so it has less stutters when hit with chunks of data to decompress which happens more often on the stock drive. Why we see 99ms highest frame time spike versus 116ms on the stock drive. Over the 1 minute or so run we end the sequence 2 seconds faster on the Integral drive. Highlighting, when data is paramount, this is likely the most extreme test we have so far, both speed and performance can see increases with the faster drive. Mirroring my previous tests on the game with SD Cards, Mechanical drives, and such.
Backing this up is a test on another game that demands an SSD using the SD Card. Here we can see the stock drive is almost 6 seconds faster than the SD card, and why running games from an SD card can affect loading and performance meaning a bigger and faster drive benefit this greatly. Comparing performance things are close to margin of error but the longer stutters and time to open doors is faster on the integral drive.
Testing Spider-Man remastered, and we see margin of error performance difference again and this aligns with the game being more GPU and CPU limited. We may see some higher texture loading faster on occasion, as the data is hitting ram and the caches faster due to the increased bandwidth and lower latency it offers, but in my tests on this game we do not see any substantial boosts over just the size and loading speed increases.
Summary and value
The cost of storage has dropped significantly; however, the price should not be the only factor. Quality and speed are vital and here integral impressed me, we have superior speed and over 3x the storage space from this 1TB Gen3 model and although gaps to the included 256GB SSD the SD shipped with are not transformative, they offer tangible double-digit increases depending on the title for great value. The improved use is another factor, over double the storage of both SSD and 256GB SD Card means I can keep more games local and active, along with freeing up the SD card for even more storage.
But the Deck will often be limited by the software itself, game engine, CPU, Ram speeds and even if it is a Gen3 or Gen4 PCIe port, hence why I am testing the Gen3. Therefore, only when pure data throughput is the limit will we see such gains, and titles such as The Last Of Us Remake are limited mostly by CPU & Memory speeds over pure SSD bandwidth, unlike Rift Apart and Dead Space which are more sensitive to Drive latency and speeds.
For £69 or $70 you can triple your current storage and improve game loading, performance and installed library for the price of a new game. As they say, sometimes the best things do come in small packages and this integral drive has become just that and a highlight in my Steam Deck upgrade recommendations for 2024.