One PC Gamer Turned Cheap SSDs Into Working Steam Cartridges, and It Struck a Nerve

A Redditor who goes by Jibril-sama has done something small and lovely: they turned their Steam library into cartridges. The build uses second-hand 2.5-inch SSDs, 128GB each, bought for about seven euros apiece, each one dropped into a custom case printed with the game’s cover art. Slot a cartridge into a SATA dock and the game comes up on screen, ready to play. It went up on r/pcmasterrace, and within a day it had been written up by PC Gamer, Tom’s Hardware, GamesRadar, and a dozen more.

The clever part is how little it takes. On Linux, a udev rule notices the moment a drive is docked, hands off to a systemd service that looks on the SSD for a launch script, and that script calls Valve’s own Steam URL protocol to jump straight to the game’s Steam page or boot it outright. There is no special hardware here, no custom silicon: an old drive, a cheap dock, and a few config files most Linux users already have. That is what makes it charming rather than fussy.

Since that first post cleared 17,000 upvotes, the creator went one better and released the whole thing. The 3D-printable cartridge shells are up on MakerWorld and the code is on GitHub, and the published version now runs on Windows as well as Linux, working with SD cards or USB sticks if you do not have spare SSDs to hand. What started as one person’s clever setup is now something anyone can build.

It is not without caveats, and to the creator’s credit they say so. The system suits replayable single-player games far better than live-service titles that need constant patching, the bargain-bin SSDs were a bit of luck that today’s storage prices would spoil, and used SSDs are not the drive you would pick for long-term storage. But nobody is doing this for practicality. They are doing it for the feeling: a shelf of labeled cartridges you can hold, lend to a friend, and pick from by hand, in a hobby that has spent years quietly deleting all of that.

Which is exactly why a Reddit hobby project became an industry talking point. It landed while the conversation is fixed on Sony ending disc production and steering everyone toward an all-digital future, and it says out loud what a lot of people feel: that “buying” a game you can never hold, lend, or keep once a storefront closes is a worse deal than the one we used to have. One person with a bag of seven-euro drives cannot fix that. But turning a digital library back into something you can put on a shelf is a pointed little argument, and it clearly landed. Sometimes the sharpest comment on where the industry is going is a homemade cartridge.