This post explains a very neat trick that can help you boot ISO files directly from hard drive. Many Linux distributions can be booted directly from ISO
Creating backups of your data is smart on any device, and the Steam Deck is no exception. Clonezilla is the perfect tool for backing up your Steam Deck; it’s a powerful partition, disk imaging, and disk cloning tool that’s simple to use. You can perform the entire procedure in less than an hour.
SSDs are faster and more reliable successors to traditional HDDs. However, making transitions from the hard drives to the SSDs can be difficult. Drive Cloning