If your favorite games are filling up your Steam Deck too quickly, it’s time for a storage upgrade. Thankfully, you don’t need to break the bank to boost your available storage, with this 2TB TeamGroup MP44S gaming SSD costing just $134.99, the lowest price you’ll find for a PCIe 4.0 M.2 2230 SSD from a reputable brand with this amount of storage.
In our TeamGroup MP44S review, we rated the TeamGroup drive highly for its solid performance, gaining it a place in our best gaming SSD guide as the best storage upgrade for your Steam Deck. With decent speeds and a lengthy five-year warranty, this tiny M.2 2230 form factor SSD is a great way to take your storage capacity up a notch, whether you’ve got a Deck or another best gaming handheld PC device, such as the Asus ROG Ally.
The MP44S uses a 4x PCIe 4.0 interface, and while the Steam Deck itself only uses PCIe 3.0, the drive is fully backward compatible. Thankfully, this PCIe 4.0 drive easily matches any other PCIe 3.0 alternatives with a top 3,500MB/s sequential write speed, so you won’t be at a disadvantage putting it in a Steam Deck.
Meanwhile, the top sequential read speed of 5,000MB/s puts it in the same category as other PCIe 4.0 2230 drives such as the Corsair MP600 Core Mini, which has the same read speeds and a slightly higher 3,800MB/s write speed, but for a higher cost.
You will also be able to max out your reads and writes if you’re thinking about a storage upgrade for a newer handheld with PCIe 4.0 support, such as the Asus ROG Ally X, as well as helping you stay future-proofed for the Steam Deck 2, should Valve ever decide to release a sequel with support for the faster speeds.
If you own a Steam Deck with 512GB storage or less, the 1TB drive might be a tempting upgrade at $75.99. However, the 1TB MP44S has a much lower 250 terabytes written (TBW) endurance rating compared to the 450TBW rating on the 2TB model, meaning the amount of data that can be written on a drive over its lifetime is nearly halved on the 1TB drive. While a handheld won’t be writing as much data to an SSD as a desktop PC, if you’re worried about drive longevity, the 2TB drive is the best option here.
This 2TB TeamGroup MP44S gaming SSD is a good, all-round upgrade for your Steam Deck or another gaming handheld PC with the potential to double your storage. $134.99 is the lowest price you’ll pay right now for a Steam Deck-capable SSD upgrade from a reputable gaming brand, and you can pick it up from Newegg right now by clicking this link here.
If you want to consider other upgrades for your handheld, check out our best Steam Deck accessories guide, with options from controllers to cases on offer. You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC hardware news, reviews, and guides, or join our community Discord to stay in the know.
