New partition for windows on already formatted drive question.

[Armadillo]

When I got my current 2tb nvme, I was lazy and left windows on my 500GB sata sdd and just stuck my games on the 2tb. I'm putting together a new system soon and want to boot off the nvme when I do it. It have 500ishgb left.

I think I have the right idea, but I've not done it this way before so just want to check.

I just shrink the current partition with the windows disk manager by whatever I want the Windows partition to be, then just point the Windows installer at the now unallocted space and it will make the new partition and the smaller boot partition in that space and leave the games alone?

That's it, simple as that? Windows manager is fine for the job? Windows install won't complain about the other partition existing or do anything weird? Current partition taking the whole drive is gpt already if that makes a difference.

Just games, so if Windows messes up, I can just redownload from Steam, but would like to avoid that.

Thanks.

 

[Armadillo]

assuming it will allow you to shrink the current partition enough, then in theory I think that should work.....could even just clone the sata SSD to it if you didn't want to reinstall everything...
I have had issues shrinking partitions in the past when I've previously used more space on the drive than I'm trying to shrink down to.

Thanks. This is a really old install, should work fine, but new build so will stick with a fresh install to avoid any gremlins. I think it should shrink ok, 500GB left, this is about as full as it's ever been. Will shrink by 120 or so, maybe 150.

However I personally would always want my OS partition to be at the start of the disk....probably just me being OCD about it.
Also if the main (/most demanding) use of the system is gaming then there may be some disadvantage to having the OS and games on the same physical drive, so outside of 1-2s boot time you may be better off leaving it as is.

If you want to avoid re-downloading the games, do you have (access to) any other storage drives (external or whatever) that you could dump the games to temporarily and then move them back afterwards?

I've used the following tool for years to shuffle games between drives:
https://www.stefanjones.ca/steam/ (3rd party freeware, not endorsed by steam btw!)

you could also just copy them using windows file transfer and just verify the game files after, it should pick up anything that's missing/broken (done this in both steam and origin before, I'm sure other launchers would work too)

I have storage, I'm just lazy and want the least effort . I suppose I should back up the games anyway, assume what can go wrong, will go wrong and it's quicker to do that, than download. I'll just back up the Steam folder then, apparently you can just rerun steam as Admin after and it will work out it's not installed and reinstall itself for you. Don't have anything on any of the other launches installed right now.

My os and games used to share (500GB was the first ssd and had windows and games) and was fine. I assume an nvme being so much faster should also be fine to share. I could leave it the same I suppose, it just seems a shame to have the nvme and stick to the sata for windows if I'm doing a fresh install anyway.

Judging from rest of thread, doesn't seem like a problem having the os partition in whatever order on an ssd. So as long as it's not a performance hit, I'm not bothered where it is .