One PC gamer is hand-making physical Steam cartridges out of old SSDs

A PC gamer going by Jibril-sama on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit has built their own physical Steam game cartridges — loading used SATA SSDs with individual games, writing custom launch scripts, and slapping on hand-made label art to complete the look. The result is a plug-and-play setup where each drive boots straight into its game via Steam's desktop client.

The games on Jibril-sama's shelf so far include Cyberpunk 2077, Forza Horizon 5, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 — all titles with massive install footprints, which makes the SSD choice a practical necessity. The custom script has been posted publicly for anyone who wants to replicate the project, and Jibril-sama says it should also work with SD cards, USB drives, and flash drives, though with a caveat: "No guarantee that it's going to work for you. I only tested on my old Win10 install, but you should at least be able to take the general code and make it work or improve it." Budget-wise, expect to spend around $30–$50 per quality 128GB SSD — and that cost stacks up fast once you start filling a shelf.

The timing is a little bittersweet. Memory prices have climbed sharply in recent months, driven by AI data center investment and broader global supply pressures, making SSDs pricier than they were even a year ago. Meanwhile, the physical media era is winding down on consoles too — Sony has confirmed it will stop manufacturing PlayStation discs in 2028, and Microsoft's next-gen Project Helix is rumored to be digital-only. Jibril-sama's project is essentially a one-person counter-movement against that tide.

Reaction on the subreddit has been enthusiastic, with plenty of commenters admiring both the aesthetic and the engineering. Whether it catches on as a wider hobbyist trend probably depends on how much those SSD prices keep climbing.