Western Digital has announced a new line of drives designed to help gamers get the most out of their Steam Deck or ROG Ally. These small M.2 2230 form factor drives are available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB options and offer a significant storage upgrade for portable PC consoles.

The ROG Ally already comes with 512GB of high-capacity SSD storage, and the Steam Deck offers options ranging from 64GB to 512GB. However, the file sizes of the largest new titles are similarly huge, with "Baldur's Gate 3" alone at approximately 150GB taking up more than half of the available storage on my mid-sized Steam Deck.

Replacing an SSD in a portable PC console is not a difficult task. Rather, the real challenge is finding a puny M.2 2230 drive that will fit in such compact hardware. These drives can be found inside Dell and Microsoft Surface laptops, but they are not sold to consumers in large quantities like SSDs for PCs.

Thankfully, this is starting to change: as Steam Deck competitors like ROG Ally and AyaNeo 2S enter the field, manufacturers like Sabrent, Micron, and Corsair have expanded their offerings to include M.2 2230 drives As The Verge points out, Framework even rolled out its own 2TB upgrade drive for Steam Deck earlier this year. The entry of a giant like Western Digital is a good sign of how seriously Silicon Valley is taking the obvious desire for portable PC consoles. [Eric Spanneut, vice president of client SSDs at Western Digital, said in a press release this week, "With the continually growing size of games, it is easy for portable consoles to fill up with new games and regular updates. "The new WD_BLACK SN770M NVMe SSD boosts available storage up to 2TB2 and is specifically designed to handle the peak performance of demanding games on portable gaming PCs.

Offering speeds of up to 5,150 MB/s on a PCIe Gen 4 basis, the drive is available now. The 500GB and 1TB versions are available at Western Digital's online store for $74.99 and $109.99, respectively; Best Buy also sells the 1TB for $129.99 and the 2TB for $239.99.