Old SSDs turned into Steam game cartridges, and it works better than it sounds

Digital libraries took away the shelf full of game boxes and replaced it with a list of icons and endless redownloading. The longing for physical media never really went away, though, and sometimes it takes on downright exotic forms – all the way down to homemade cartridges hiding a regular drive inside.

That's exactly what one player did, building a collection of miniature boxes with printed labels. Each one houses a small-capacity 2.5-inch SSD holding a single game from their Steam library.

The idea solved a pretty mundane problem: space on the main drive kept running out, and fitting in just a couple of titles meant uninstalling everything else.

The point isn't collecting for its own sake, it's about heavyweight games that only get launched every couple of months. The Elder Scrolls Online, with its hours-long reinstall ritual, became the main motivation, though Cyberpunk 2077 also made the cut at a modest-by-today's-standards 60GB, mostly because making a box for it sounded fun. The economics here are shaky at best: a memory shortage fueled by AI data center demand has pushed prices up even on secondhand drives, with 250GB units now regularly going for $20-50 on auction sites.

The creator is well aware of this and put it plainly:

I've definitely weighed the costs and it would probably be cheaper in the long run to just get a 2TB ssd or something but honestly…I'm having too much fun making the boxes and labels to give up on it lol

Flash memory has an unpleasant quirk that people usually only remember once it's too late. Data in NAND cells gets stored as an electrical charge, and without power that charge slowly leaks away, so a drive sitting in a box for a few years might greet its owner with empty space or corrupted files.

The fix is simple enough: plug the drive in once a year and run a file integrity check, letting Valve's client redownload whatever got damaged.

For those chasing real archival durability, there's an alternative path through optical media. A BD-R disc costs less than a used SSD, sits fine without power, and doesn't suffer from charge leakage, though nobody's suggesting running games straight off the disc itself – the idea is more of an archive paired with an installer. It's a bit funny how rarely this option comes up these days, especially with optical media currently at the center of a major industry scandal.