Upgrading the 64gb Steam Deck with a 1tb nvme drive

I recently ordered a 64gb Steam Deck from the Steam Summer Sale. It was 10% off but sales tax is 19% so... After installing Hades, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, I was already hitting the storage limit for the games I wanted to install (like Witcher III). So I thought I'll just upgrade it because I also want to play test Diablo IV on it and see if it's playable enough. I ordered a Sabrent 2230 M.2 NVMe Gen 4 1TB from Amazon. The next day it arrived and I prepared my Steam Deck for an upgrade.

After removing the 8 screws in the back plate, prying it open wasn't easy. You need to have a guitar pick or something strong and thin like that. Lucky for me I found a prying tool from an iFixIt kit.

You have to start prying it from the top, near the right bumper (R1). I made the mistake of trying to pry it from the bottom and left sides and I think that caused some minor cosmetic damages on the plastic case. Once it is pried open from the top, then it is easy to continue from there.

You have to disconnect the battery as well just to be extra safe (and also pressing the power button multiple times just to exhaust all capacitors of power) as hot swapping a drive might cause damage to the steam or the drive.

Another issue I had is that the electronic shielding on the old eMMC drive is not fitting the new 1tb Sabrent drive (because of the heat plate with the branding). All I had to do is slightly tear off the end as it is attached with adhesive and wrap the new drive with it. After that, putting everything back together is straightforward.

Now into making the recovery flash drive, I had my Windows gaming PC for it so I installed Rufus. At that time, Rufus website was down so I downloaded it from SourceForge.net. I downloaded the 2gb recovery image from Steam website as well. Everything went well and the image was written into my flash drive in about 10 minutes. I put it on my USB-C dock and inserted it in my dock.

I botched the initial button press to boot my deck into recovery mode - instead of stopping to press the power button and leaving the volume down button, i did the other way around after I heard the startup sound. I immediately recognized my mistake and pressed the volume down button instead. It took another 10 seconds (and no more startup sound) for the boot selection screen to appear. At this point, my flash drive didn't appear in any of the options.

I think I did something wrong on flashing my drive there (maybe it was flashed in MBR instead of GPT?). I had another spare flash drive so I used that instead, the only issue is that this one is very slow. Anyway, after 15 or 20 minutes, Rufus is done and I reinserted the new drive in the dock. This time, it was recognized and there were no issues after that. Well, apart from the Steam Deck controls not working on the recovery OS, I just had to use the touch screen for everything. The process took a long time and many times I thought that the flash drive wouldn't work again because the screen is just frozen for a long time. The whole reimaging process probably took 40 minutes mainly because of the flash drive's speed.

After the process was finished, I restarted the Deck and saw the Steam Deck logo which is sign that the Steam Deck is finally booting up from the drive. I removed the dock and was greeted with the setup screen. The deck controls are somehow not working, not the joystick nor touchpads nor buttons. Only the touch screen worked. Apparently this is a known issue and you just have to go through the install process like this until it can connect to the internet and update. After that, everything was flawless and fast and I finally have 1tb storage on my Steam Deck. I'm thinking if I would ever expand with a memory card but maybe after I finish my game backlog.