Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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Thanks for all the detail. My daily driver is currently a windows machine, but I have looked into swapping to a Linux system.
I will keep this in mind and will very likely just get a new SSD. I have noticed some longer load times.
Due to budgeting, I will like just reinstall and use the SteamOS recovery key. Only downside is setting up EmuDeck, Lutris, and Decky again.
On Windows, Macrium Reflect is really good for disk cloning. They used to have a free version, but not anymore. Instead, you can use the 30-day trial and get all the features. They specifically support cloning Linux drives intelligently. It doesn't just go sector by sector, but that's always a fallback for things like LVM (Linux Volume Manager), which it does not natively support.
https://www.macrium.com/blog/cloning-and-imaging-linux-file-systems-39bffeaf6307
External enclosures for NVMe drives are pretty cheap to help with the cloning. Now that I use Linux on my laptop, I simply took my Windows NVMe out of my computer and stuck it in an enclosure and it still boots off USB. That's pretty handy. I bought a UGREEN brand one.
If you can swing it, Sabrent makes some nvme enclosures for the 2230 size the deck uses https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-ne30 that are super reasonable price wise, https://sabrent.com/collections/nvme-enclosures/products/ec-snveis for full size and is also super reasonable. What I did for mine and my partner's decks upgrading from a 512 GB ssd, if you have drive space you could do with one enclosure. I use the old ssd as a removable drive now so it doesn't got to waste.
Ssd is the way to go for sure, SD card is nice to have but it's very noticeably slower for some things, I tend to use it for emulators and games I don't play frequently.
20 bucks is cheaper enough that I might do it. Setting back up all my emulation and tweaks again seems less fun than the first time.