One of the beautiful things about the Steam Deck is that you can upgrade your storage. And it's easy to do. The once-unfamiliar M.2 2230 form factor is now available from major SSD brands, making it possible to upgrade the Steam Deck's storage quickly and affordably.

The one problem is how to get everything from the old drive to the new one, whether it's the 256GB version or the 512GB version, it's still a healthy amount of additional storage, and just keeping it in a drawer It just feels like a waste. [That's where the DockCase Pocket comes in. That's where the M.2 external enclosure comes in: the DockCase Pocket allows you to connect a new drive via the USB Type-C port on the Deck (other handhelds are also available) and clone the existing drive.

But what the DockCase Pocket offers is a custom-made design made just for the smaller 2230 SSD, one that can hold drives up to 2TB, and most importantly, it comes with a display. This is a bit of a gimmick, but it gives you a live display of the drive's performance and operating temperatures.

There is one more feature worth mentioning here, and that is power loss protection (PLP). Given that SSDs operate straight out of the enclosure, they can be somewhat sensitive to sudden power loss, such as a USB cable pulled straight out, and the DockCase provides this PLP support for three seconds before powering off, so that the drive's data is securely protected for three seconds before powering off.

There is a small capacitor inside the device that starts charging the moment it is connected to the device, and the progress of the short charging process can be monitored by the reader. Once the charging process is complete, we can be prepared for cases like ours where we categorically refuse to use the secure USB eject protocol.

As for performance, the included 10Gbps Type-C cable allows the device to run at a theoretical peak of 1024 MB/sec. When tested with the 512GB SSD included in the top-of-the-line Steam Deck, the synthetic benchmarks showed read/write performance of 900MB/s and 874MB/s, respectively.

In the real world, a simulated transfer of a Steam game folder with a 30GB folder of mixed file types yielded a peak transfer rate of 755MB/s and took 113 seconds for the entire process to complete.

This was a decent performance, and overall, slightly faster than the standard Jsaux M.2 SSD enclosure I tested. However, not by much. It was only 7 seconds slower in file transfers and a bit behind in the 3DMark Storage test, but still a good inexpensive option for cloning or continuing to use an older Deck SSD.

Therein lies the problem with the DockCase Pocket. At the moment, it has an early bird price of $69 on Kickstarter, but with an MSRP of $109, it is an expensive enclosure. However, the MSRP is $109, and it is an expensive enclosure. If you want to use a live readout or have the peace of mind of knowing that you have protection in the event of a power outage, it is worth the higher cost over a much less expensive dumb enclosure.

The DockCase Pocket has additional cooling and feels ultra-robust, but it is still a lot. Sure, the readout screen looks funky, and honestly, it may be the coolest external SSD I've ever played with.