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About Steam games and "Small" SSD space. (Steam Mover, Salvation?)

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I have a 120GB Vertex3 with three games installed = 41GB's.

Skyrim - 9GB
Witcher 2 - 17GB
Battlefield 3 - 15GB

Throw in Baldur's Gate 2 = 2GB.

I currently have 19GB's of free space on the drive, with only four games installed.
 
NoSoup4You said:
I have a 120GB Vertex3 with three games installed = 41GB's.

Skyrim - 9GB
Witcher 2 - 17GB
Battlefield 3 - 15GB

Throw in Baldur's Gate 2 = 2GB.

I currently have 19GB's of free space on the drive, with only four games installed.
Click to expand...

Well, you could still install yet another game. Anyway, not all games takes that much space. And how many games to you play at once?

Also, installing your few favourite games on the SSD makes sense. Rest of the games could be installed on harddrives. And Steam mover could be used.

Anyway, I agree that Steam should have had the possibilty to install games to custom locations.
 
Full Steam Collection (637Gb in total) on 2x500Gb RAID 0.

SteamTool/SteamMover to put individual games on my 120Gb SSD if I so desire.

What's the problem again?
 
Anybody have issues with using an SSD for Windows and running all Steam games from a secondary HDD?

I don't see anywhere in Steam to set the download directory for games. So, if you install Steam to your secondary drive it should automatically install games there instead of on the SSD/boot drive?
 
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I only use my SSD for Windows and LoL. All my Steam games are on a 3TB 7200RPM SATAIII Drive. Works fine. Less of a hassle, and really the load time isn't OMG I can't stand it slow.
 
There are many different opinions on this subject, when looking through the posts here..

I'm sure we all would have liked to have several Terrabytes with SSD space. But hey, it is what it is, and one just have to make the best out of the situation :thumbsup:

Need about ten posts more to be able to make myself a signature :thumbsup: ^_^

Regards
The_Golden_Man
 
georgec84 said:
Anybody have issues with using an SSD for Windows and running all Steam games from a secondary HDD?

I don't see anywhere in Steam to set the download directory for games. So, if you install Steam to your secondary drive it should automatically install games there instead of on the SSD/boot drive?
Click to expand...

ImpulsE69 said:
I only use my SSD for Windows and LoL. All my Steam games are on a 3TB 7200RPM SATAIII Drive. Works fine. Less of a hassle, and really the load time isn't OMG I can't stand it slow.
Click to expand...


I do this fine too... only game I will have on my SSD is Star Craft II, Battlefield 3, and Diablo 3... these games will last me long enough till SSD prices drop enough in the future... all my steam games auto download and install in my 1 TB HDD...
 
The_Golden_Man said:
How much RAM do you have?

If you have 8GB, then the Hibernate file will take up 8GB, and the swap file would also take up about 8GB.

If you have 16GB, then you can imagine the rest.

You can disable Hibernate and remove the Hibernate file. You can also adjust or disable the Swap file
Click to expand...

I'm at 16GB Ram right now...OK, I need to investigate some more, that seems insanely unnecessary, no? Guess I don't understand anything about it, hah.
 
The_Golden_Man said:
How to disable/Enable the hibernate file in win7

If you don't use Hibernate, this will save you 16GB of SSD space right now.


Also, make sure to run Windows Disk Cleanup. This can in many cases save you alot of Gigabytes :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

cool, I'm gonna check that out. I'm not currently running on the drive yet--still have my old HDD (750gb) running with Win7 as I make sure everything I want to save is properly transferred to an external drive before formatting.

It's a Corsair Force3 90gb. My plan was to install Win7, Adobe CS Master suite (Just the essentials--it's free through work, though I'm not sure of the entire size), Guild Wars 2 (~25gb), and a handful of games on steam that i have yet to play--Deus Ex HR which I just got on sale, and Skyrim which I will always want to play.

Thing is...Win7 took forever to install on the SSD--a fresh install, so I thought that was odd.
 
because even though people endless spout their love for steam, it still sucks to have to d/l something on it that you are in the mood to play at that moment.
 
Beev said:
I have a 128gb SSD. I play WoW, so it takes over 20gb. Windows takes up about 20gb these days, so that leaves me with about 80gb. Then I have Starcraft 2 installed, and I have room saved for Diablo 3 too.

I was able to install Borderlands via Steam, but then I wanted to install Skyrim. NOPE! Out of space!

A 128gb SSD is not enough, and Steam's inability to install to other drives drove me to simply put the entire thing on a separate, slower drive.
Click to expand...

you can tell steam to install games to a different drive....i have a 80gb ssd and a 1TB drive, alll my steam games are installed to the 1TB.
 
vshah said:
you can tell steam to install games to a different drive....i have a 80gb ssd and a 1TB drive, alll my steam games are installed to the 1TB.
Click to expand...

Some games from steam one might actually want on their SSD drive. Some games with brutal load times can benefit a lot with an SSD.
 
SW:TOR - 20gb
ME2 - 20gb
BF3 - 15gb
ME3 - 12gb
SC2 - 10gb
WoW - 22gb

Not counting whatever I have on Steam. Although I could go and uninstall ToR and maybe ME2 since I dont play them much anymore.

I have a 256 crucial M4 so Im good.
 
Ok for one this isnt an issue, as mentioned above steammover will solve all the some on SSD some on HDD issues.

For two im in the all games installed crowd and dont like to re-install or download as needed. So i run my whole steam folder off 2 1TB drives in RAID 0, this gives me much better performance than a single drive for a very low price. I also have a SSD but have not found moving games to it to be worth the time, no noticable difference in the games i tried it with.
 
I have 378GB games installed and about 85GB of those are tied to Steam. I can’t fit my Steam games on my 120GB SSD because I have Windows and applications installed there too.

I don’t uninstall games because they’re constantly benchmarked, tweaked and/or played. Even the ones I haven’t touched in years are still patched and updated as new content becomes available (I just patched Halo 1 yesterday as an example). Plus I could get an urge to play them anytime.

Also NTFS junction points (AKA Steam mover) are dangerous and messy IMO.

So in short I don’t want to constantly uninstall/reinstall my games because my drives are permanent storage, not caches.
 
I used to run a 1TB drive + a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD as a cache drive on my Z68 rig specifically for Steam (had OS and other apps/games on a 128GB M4) and with all the games installed easily used well over half of that 1TB capacity.

I have since "upgraded" to dual 256GB Samsung 830s in RAID-0. I say "upgrade" because while its certainly a huge improvement in performance, it does leave me just over 450GB of usable space and am thus forced to be selective in which titles I keep installed when I didn't have to worry about that before. Its not too big of a deal and just uninstall large single player games, particularly ones with low replay value, once I'm done with them (Bioshock 1 and 2 for example).

But yeah, it is still far from ideal; I'd much rather have at least 1TB of space specifically for my OS and all my apps and not have to worry about rationing my SSD capacity
 
I think the VelociRaptor fills the perfect niche for people like us who want faster performance than 7200RPM drives but have too many games to fit on a SSD.

900GB variants are almost certainly on their way, and they’ll be completely viable for big game installs.
 
Why not use the space on your HDD or SSD that you pay for as a consumer?

If I own a 1TB HDD (and I do), then if I happen to have enough software to almost fill it up completely, then I will, otherwise I wouldn't have bought a 1TB HDD in the first place. It's like asking why do some people buy 16GB of RAM for their desktop PCs? Well, I don't know, some will use it, some won't use even 10% of it, but if I was one of those people buying 16GB of RAM then I would most likely happen to be the kind of person who's going to use almost that much from time to time, otherwise I would have been content with 4GB or maybe 8GB.

To me it comes down to the usage of the product at its full potential (or near to that), have something worth your money, rather than just having "too much" rather than "not enough" for the heck of it.
 
georgec84 said:
Anybody have issues with using an SSD for Windows and running all Steam games from a secondary HDD?

I don't see anywhere in Steam to set the download directory for games. So, if you install Steam to your secondary drive it should automatically install games there instead of on the SSD/boot drive?
Click to expand...

No issues here.
 
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