I bought the Micron 2400 2TB a while ago when it was on sale somewhere, before iFixit started selling them on their web site. The Steam Deck upgrade went smoothly and I haven’t had any problems with it since. The stock 512GB is in an external USB enclosure now.

Edit: Corrected the link.

The 3.5.5 stable update went flawlessly for me 🤷

There’s a lot of noise out there because the Steam Deck is practically infinitely customizable with thousands of guides and tips on the Internet being used by people that are technically illiterate. Then they update, and one of those customizations break, and they have no idea what’s going on and just shit on Valve. Are they using an incompatible Decky plugin? Are they dual-booting the internal drive? Have they made manual customizations to their Deck from some Internet guide but didn’t really know what they were doing? Is the Micro SD card really erased or is the mount point changed or something else?

Updating from beta or preview to stable? Valve’s undoubtedly made breaking changes between the preview versions and the final stable version, so they have to support updating to stable 3.5.5 from not only stable 3.4 but a number of preview and beta versions that have potentially been customized by users too.

I’m not saying that there are zero problems with the 3.5.5 stable update. But Reddit will be full of complaints while everyone else is just playing with their Decks.

Tip: A lot of USB-A to USB-C adapters either can’t be used for booting from an external USB-A drive, or (for bus-powered devices) they don’t supply enough power to the USB drive, or they’re just unable to maintain a stable connection.

I’ve always had excellent experiences with the Apple USB adapters. They’re more expensive and larger than the chinese no-names on Amazon but it’s definitely worth it IMO.