It’s been possible to find tiny SSDs for the Steam Deck for a little while, but yesterday Corsair launched its 1TB MP600 Mini SSDs which ought to offer better performance than other options. Here are the cheapest places to find it in the US and UK!
The Corsair MP600 Mini offers higher capacity than any Steam Deck you can buy from Valve, with the official offerings topping out at 512GB. That means you get double the storage space with this drive, or even more if you’re upgrading a 256GB or 64GB eMMC model.
In terms of performance, we can expect good things from this drive – it’s a PCIe 4.0 model rated for up to 4800MB/s reads and writes, with stellar random read/write stats too – 850K IOPS and 1100K IOPS respectively. That puts it in close contention with the full-size Corsair MP600 Pro and some of the best gaming SSDs on the market.
However, it’s important to note that these speeds are achieved with a PCIe 4.0 interface, something that you won’t find on the Deck – Valve’s handheld is limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds. That means around a maximum of 3500MB/s for reads and writes, while random speeds should be reduced to a similar extent. It’ll be fascinating to see what the first reviews of the MP600 Mini say, but you should be minimising game load times with this drive regardless!
The PCIe 4.0 nature of the drive should also make it a good choice for future Steam Deck competitors, including the recently-announced Asus ROG Ally, assuming of course that they are easy enough to disassemble and swap out the drives.
In any case, I hope this deal is interesting to you – and be sure to let me know what you think in the comments below! Thanks for joining me once again and I’ll see you tomorrow for the last two deals of the week.
