I do not suggest these drives for your steam deck unless you're planning on using it docked all the time, or dont card about battery life. They use more power than the stock ssd and these WD ones consume up to 15w which will kill your battery life pretty quickly. Also they seem to run much warmer than the ones shipped with the deck.
Also why buy from framework? Their price is no better than anywhere else. Sounds like they're just trying to cash in on a new market.
It answers right there in sentence 3 _why buy from Framework_.
> the handheld Steam Deck relies on the physically smaller but less common 2230 format. As a result, it can be difficult to find legitimate sources for larger capacity drives ... Since we order a huge number of Western Digital drives already, it’s relatively easy for us to add one more line item
> Sounds like they're just trying to cash in on a new market.
So, business 101? What's the problem? They're offering a legitimate product for a legitimate market trying to solve a legitimate problem they identified.
These are quite readily available from many other retailers and sometimes for even cheaper than $300. My guess is they had plans to release a 2tb storage module with these inside them but people aren't actually buying the 1tb modules so they decided to sell them for use in steam deck.
If business 101 is marketing to fanboys then I guess you're right.
supply chain is king when it comes to purchasing flash, there are an enormous amount of fake SSDs and flash cards floating around.
if this one particular drive is the new hotness then yeah there will be chinese sellers knocking up stencils and packaging tomorrow, whoosh this 128gb drive is now a (checks label) 2TB WD SN740!
knockoffs and fraud not just permeate but practically saturate the supply chain for flash. if you don't know where it's coming from then it's not genuine, period the end. best buy, adorama/B&H, or other electronics retailers with a legitimate supply chain? sure, fine. but anyone that commingles inventory, especially amazon, and any sort of third-party marketplace, you're going to get a significant number if not majority of fakes.
> I do not suggest these drives for your steam deck unless you're planning on using it docked all the time, or dont card about battery life. They use more power than the stock ssd and these WD ones consume up to 15w which will kill your battery life pretty quickly. Also they seem to run much warmer than the ones shipped with the deck.
Is this really measured to be true, or just hypothesized from the specs?
I could imagine peak sustained draw per second could be higher because the I/O might be better, but do they actually use more power to read the same number of bits?
> They use more power than the stock ssd and these WD ones consume up to 15w
No, they don't. 15W is pretty much the highest achievable power consumption for a M.2 22x110mm enterprise SSD; beyond that, you're running into limitations on how much current can be safely passed by the connector's few pins connected to a paltry 3.3V. These days, it would be typical for a M.2 2230 SSD to rarely go above 1.5W except in benchmarks that really are not representative of the workload a video game presents to the drive.
Also why buy from framework? Their price is no better than anywhere else. Sounds like they're just trying to cash in on a new market.