this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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Steam Hardware

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So relatively new deck owner.

Got a deal on a regular Deck for pretty cheap. I didn’t opt for the 1TB SSD or anything like that.

I know that it’s a pretty easy hardware replacement for the SSD or the SD card.

I just have a couple questions:

  1. Does the cloning process for the SSD require specialized tools?
  2. do you notice a huge performance improvement on SSD compared to SD card?
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[–] Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

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.