How do people manage their disk space these days?

wunkley

wunkley

wunkley

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Yancashire
Games are big these days. Massive. Many games are now 50GB's + unpacked so hard drive space is starting to become an issue.

I did a new gaming build only about 10 months ago. Knew I wanted SSD drives only (mainly noise / silent system reasons as well as speed) and got a 1TB SSD drive and a 500GB SSD drive for my games (OS on a 250GB SSD). So, 3 drives, 2 fairly big purely for games - I thought this would serve me well for quite a while.

However, I'm almost full capacity now on both gaming drives. I have Steam and some stand alone installs and mods on my 1TB drive, then Uplay, Origin, and a few standalone games on my 500GB drive.

What's the best way to 'manage' space and keep things tidy with regards to steam, uplay etc? Or is the only answer to keep buying new bigger drives? I only really play a handful of games at any one time, but I want to be able to dip into older and other games ad-hoc, and don't want hassle.

I've very recently upgraded to medium fibre broadband, so particularly for Steam I guess I could delete local files for some games and re download them when needed? What used to take me half a day to a day can now be downloaded in a few hours.
Any other tips though?
 
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I'd delete some games. I have a 512 GB SSD purely for games and I have 20 ish games on there with 40 GB of space remaining and a few of those are really large games (40GB for WoW, 50GB BF1, Division 38GB, Deus Ex MD 57 GB). You could install some games to C:\ for now if you run your system drive on a SSD also and it's 256GB as it's unlikely you'd use anywhere near that space for your system files. It's easy to do by adding another library directory in Steam.

I guess you could also back-up some of the larger games you think you'll play again to your non-SSD 1TB drive and just bring them back over to the SSD when you need them. But I'd really just delete some games that you aren't playing.
 
Got a 500GB SSD and never have issues of space. I just have 3-5 games installed at most at any one time. With a 40 meg line I have it does not take long to download games from steam anyway :)
 
Cheers lads. As I've just upgraded to 40meg broadband, I guess some deleting and re-downloading as and when is in order then. If I didn't have fibre broadband though, what would the options be? Just wondering if I haven't missed something obvious...
 
I have a 120gb ssd for OS, 500gb ssd + 1TB ssd for gaming and a 1TB HDD for other programs etc and i have tons of games installed...

as said above the only option is to remove games you dont plan to play in the near future and redownload when you want to play them.. an ssd is pointless if your just storing games your not playing on them

and im on a 15mb broadband line so i choose carefully as most games i download overnight
 
wunkley said:
Cheers lads. As I've just upgraded to 40meg broadband, I guess some deleting and re-downloading as and when is in order then. If I didn't have fibre broadband though, what would the options be? Just wondering if I haven't missed something obvious...
Click to expand...

Some possible options could be an external USB hard drive to back up unused Steam games to (Backup/Restore function). Does Origin have a similar function? I don't use it enough.

I personally have a 512GB 850Pro SSD to boot from, 1TB SSD for games and a 3TB Storage drive.
 
I also just delete games while im not playing them but save the user files so when they reinstall theyre all setup and ready to go. I started doing it after i got fibre when i realised i could download most games in under an hour and the biggest games still under 2.

I've just been using a fast SSD for system files and a slower 500gb for games, its been plenty for me for the last few years but very recently where im finding im having to delete games a lot more often so i think another 500gb gaming SSD will be in my future next year.
 
I got 128 ssd for os - *need to double it really* 4 TB data drive which I also use for recording

got about 40 gigs left on the ssd and about 1.73 tbs left; which when I clean out videos goes back up to just under 3 tbs :)
 
Just play mine off a normal 3tb harddrive.

For the time spent moving them back and forth from HDD to SSD or uninstalling and reinstalling I think i'd rather wait a few extra seconds for them to load :)
 
I'm planning to do this.

Install to my 1TB ssd
Finished the m?
Move to nas
Setup steam library directory to nas

New games get ssd old get hdds
 
If I won't go back to a game, I just delete it. Internet is more than quick enough to re-download, plus no usage cap.

250GB OS SSD, 500GB Game SSD, 1TB Storage
 
For the last 17 years I don't think I've ever had more than a few games installed at any one time on my PC's.

Over the last 10 years its been 3 games at most. Right now I have just 2 games.

250GB x2 = 1 for OS+programs, 1 for games. Plenty of storage room, by far plenty.
 
I've got a SSD for Origin, one for Ubisoft and three for Steam. If I run out of space, I'll just delete some games I'm not likely to play right now... And with 150MB fibre uncapped Internet it's painless if I need to download again.
 
I tend to just ignore disk space until Windows/Steam complains at me. Then I just delete something I've not played in a while. I've got a 480GB drive with Windows + Games on and a separate 250GB. Despite having plenty installed and lots of VMs that are using up space I've never really had many issues. I rarely tend to want to play more than a few different games within a short period of time so have no issue with leaving most of my library uninstalled.

Then again, SSDs are pretty damn cheap these days... :p
 
Same here got 120mb fibre so i can just redownload them again if i need to space save.

But realistically only bother with 1-2 games at a time so a 250Gb ssd is all i need. If i were running out of room i would just move it all to the 3TB mechanical drive. Especially if its a non too often played game where loading times aren't an issue, such as BF1 when you absolutely must get into that tank before anyone else :D
 
What with Battlefield 1, COD, Titanfall 2 few others I ran out of space on my 512gb game SSD, never has it been known.

My Solution - download Steam Mover and lets me move a few of the games onto a partition on my 2tb hard drive and does all the dirty work for you. Simple as click click done and Steam Client is happy as larry.

Steam Mover
 
Similar to others but 128 GB M.2 OS boot drive. 512GB M.2 for games and temp storage.

The only HDDs I have now are in a NAS which runs XPEnology on an old Core 2 Quad based mini-tower. That stores anything I want to keep long term.

I tend to use the Steam backup option directly to the NAS for the large games I might want to play again or have 76 mbps connection for those that just take a few mins to install again from Steam.
 
I keep the most used/new games on my SSD (500GB) and the rest on my 4TB mech (which is running low on space! :p) as I don't want to be at the mercy of my peak time internet speeds.
 
I've used a SSD for my boot drive for years now. Started with 40GB, then 80GB, the 120gb, then 250gb. So I make bad decisions. It is very hard to manage the C: drive these days. I have 2 x 500gb and 1 x 1.5tb drive. Will upgrade both the 500gb drives to 2tb drives soon, games are just huge, and I have a lot of music etc.

Thank goodness hard drives are cheap as chips. However, if I was sensible I'd only have 3-5 games installed, 1 permanent, Football Manager, the others I should complete, delete and download the next few games to complete. By 2057 I should have completed all 400+ of the games I've got.
 
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