If you've been thinking about modifying the internal storage of your Steam Deck, it seems like you might not want to do that. Lawrence Yang, who is part of the Valve design team, commented on modifications popping up online and cautioned against this.

According to Yang, "the charger IC gets very hot" which is a great reason why heat dissipation elements should be kept in place. The problem comes from a PC Gamer article that showed off a mod being performed by Twitter user TheSmcelrea. The user proceeded to move thermal pads in order to fit a NVMe PCIe M.2 2242 card. Yang states that while it might appear to work, but the aforementioned M.2 drive isn't meant to be used in the Steam Deck and that it draws more power. Because of this, it can also get much hotter than what the Steam Deck is meant to accommodate. All of this combined can shorten the life of the console.

A NVMe PCIe M.2 2242 card will fit, but it's not meant for the Steam Deck

Of course, if you need more space, there are options. The easiest being to just pop in a microSD card into the Steam Deck. In various tests, it is shown that external cards work relatively well when it comes to read and write speeds. If you insist on upgrading the internal storage, you'll want to try and find one that is compatible with the console's NVMe PCIe M.2 2230 slot. These are not the fastest, but the are affordable and available through various retailers.

Recently, Valve announced that it would complete Q2 pre-orders of the Steam Deck and start shipping Q3 2022 orders. The firm also announced that it would be increasing shipments of the console in Q3, more than doubling the current weekly output. This is great news for anyone still waiting to get their hands on a Steam Deck console.

Source: Lawrence Yang (Twitter)