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I do believe you can install one, but I don't think you could hotswap it. Keep it unpowered while doing stuff like that. Hotswapping means replacing the part while the machine is running.
Oh, haha yes, you’re right. I meant swap. Obviously power everything down.
"Hot swapping" means doing it while the machine is running. You can't hot swap an NVME SSD. You gotta turn the computer off.
It would appear that theres a standoff for 2230 and maybe 2280 on the right, so you can just reuse your Steamdecks SSD.
How are you planning to yank the m.2 while it's still running?
I'd just try it out. If it fails you can still flash the installer to a USB stick or SD card.
There could be driver issues for the difrerent Hardware devices, most likely it will run just fine, but you may have performance impacts you later dont know where they are comming from. Reinstalling is the safe way, if you dont want to redownload all games, you can copy the steam games folder
I can't imagine they would make separate images for each device, apart from steam frame for the different cpu architecture. It should work if its up to date.
For what it’s worth, I recently upgraded my mobo, cpu and ram. I used all the parts from my old rig hot swapped. Hard drives, GPU, etc. I’m using Cachy Linux.
Booted up fine no problems. Didn’t have to reimage/format.
You could always just swap them and if it works it works. Otherwise nuke and pave.
Just a little note, because words matter, and a lot of people are getting confused.
Hot swapping means swapping them with the machines on and running 👍
Pretty sure you can just flash a USB drive
Thanks for the advice, everyone! I'm using rsync to back up my home directory on the Deck right now, and I've migrated a lot of my smaller games I'll want to have access to on both the Machine and Deck to a 256 GB microSD I had lying around (including my RetroDeck setup). I've also flashed the SteamOS installer onto a thumb drive.
I think I'll plan to just try putting the Deck SSD into the Steam Machine and see if it boots up and runs properly or not. If it looks like there's any issues, I'll just reinstall SteamOS on it and restore some of the files I'll want to from the backup external drive.
Then I'll do the same with the SM SSD in the SD, reinstall if anything's funky, and then copy files from the backup onto it again (though most of those will be mods and such for larger games that'll just live on the Steam Machine now, so it should be light work).
Just need to make sure to have a list of my Decky plugins in case I need to wipe things and make a list of the Flatpaks I've installed.
Should work just fine without any work. Just plop it in.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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