Steam and SSD's

Gav_881 · 1 Aug 2012 at 13:03

I have a 120gb SSD witch frankly is not nearly big enough for steam, now i have heard fabled speak of an app called steam mover to allow me to move some less used games to another drive.

Q1. is it worth bothering Ie. do you notice the difference loading etc.?

Q2. Can you do it the other way with the same benefit (if there is one) as everything is currently on the platter drive.

Ice213 · 1 Aug 2012 at 13:09

I used steam mover the other day, it's pretty useful to be honest. You can move games from your ssd to your bigger storage HDD at a click, and move them back again. It doesn't take a long time to move it and all the games still through the steam library and have the overlay etc.

You can use it on non steam games too, I moved my Retail Max Payne 3 the other day as I had completed it and that 30 gig install was totally hogging my SSD

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I assume you could also do it the other way around, as in if steam was on you HDD and you wanted the quicker load times of the SSD, it would be the same process

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Is it worth it? Well that's all up to the individual, if you don't mind waiting for a game/level to load, then probably not, but if you want quicker loads of levels and games then yeah it will be worth it

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Omaeka · 1 Aug 2012 at 13:13

Can I use Steam Mover to transfer games from my HDD to an external?

Devrij · 1 Aug 2012 at 13:16

I use it to put games like bf3 and shogun onto my ssd, leaving the other 400GB on my mech drive. Well worth it for both of those games

HeX · 1 Aug 2012 at 13:19

Steam Mover is tip top.

Ice213 · 1 Aug 2012 at 13:21

Omaeka said:
Can I use Steam Mover to transfer games from my HDD to an external?

Hmmm, I don't see any reason why not, although I haven't tried it myself. Give it a go

. If it fails, it won't effect the original installation, as I didn't run as admin on my first go at moving max payne, and it came up with an error message, and it had copied most of the files, but doesn't remove the original ones until it is successful

Rroff · 1 Aug 2012 at 13:27

Might have problems creating junction/directory links to remoavable storeage but I've never tried.

Yaayuh! · 1 Aug 2012 at 15:00

How many games do you play at once? I only have 3-5 installed at once :/

I personally would stick them all on one drive and invest in a bigger SSD.

Gav_881 · 1 Aug 2012 at 17:08

steams just crossed the 200gb threshold, i work away a lot so its not like i can just download one if i fancy a bash at it

synixx · 1 Aug 2012 at 18:20

Does anybody know if steam mover can be used to set the download location for games? My friend has installed steam on his SSD and now wants to install some games on the HDD but obviously it will download to the SSD by default.

Knubje · 1 Aug 2012 at 18:49

I created some symbolic links for my steam games to my other drive. Steam is installed on the SSD but games can be linked from 7200rpm HDD.

Probably worth looking at Steam Mover as that seems to be the easy way of doing it

Makes a difference on the games loading but not huge amounts for me. It is quicker though so makes it a wise plan to do it.

Gav_881 · 1 Aug 2012 at 18:50

synixx said:
Does anybody know if steam mover can be used to set the download location for games? My friend has installed steam on his SSD and now wants to install some games on the HDD but obviously it will download to the SSD by default.

Its not that intelligent it just runs a script to move the files and link them to the old location.

For those that care it appears to work a charm and loading times from the SSD are far better than my platter drive.

Tombo · 1 Aug 2012 at 18:51

synixx said:
Does anybody know if steam mover can be used to set the download location for games? My friend has installed steam on his SSD and now wants to install some games on the HDD but obviously it will download to the SSD by default.

You could create a junction from the SSD to the HDD, start the download, then pause it and copy it to the HDD and resume. So say S is the SSD and H is the HDD.

Start download and then pause it.
Move folder e.g. S:\Steam\steamapps\game and move the folder "game" to H:\Steam\.

Then in a command prompt, mklink /j "S:\Steam\steamapps\game" "H:\Steam\game"

And then resume the download. If he has enough room to install the game before moving he could just use steam mover to make it easier.

You could make the junction before even starting the download but you'd have to know what the folder name was.

chris-82 · 1 Aug 2012 at 19:50

Devrij said:
I use it to put games like bf3 and shogun onto my ssd, leaving the other 400GB on my mech drive. Well worth it for both of those games

i pretty much do this

i have my steam and my games all on my hdd and move the games im cureently playing to my ssd.(i would have had my steam on my ssd and then had the games linked to my hdd drive but i already had a lot of games downloaded on the hdd and steam folder so decided to leave it i think it works better this way anyway instead of downloading then having to move it to hdd due to space)