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I have a 1 TB HDD and a 120 GB SSD. On the HDD I have all my data along with Steam and—currently—all my games. On the SSD I have Windows 7 and programs, but there's 50 GB of unused space that I wish to use for the games I most commonly play on Steam (for quicker loading times, etc).

To summarize, I want to have this situation:

  • 120GB SSD (C:\): Windows, programs, and a few Steam games.
  • 1TB HDD (D:\): data, Steam, and most games.

Is this possible? If not, what other choices do I have to do something similar?

Magnamuz
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    Just wanted to jump in and say that I do this for a lot of games and it's AWESOME. Nolonar's point stands, although the only games I've had problems with are Tribes: Ascend and (non-steam) Starcraft 2. – Erty Seidohl Jan 13 '15 at 21:08
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    I have this setup. I've found that simply having the OS on an SSD an the games on another disk is a tremendous boost. The whole computer runs faster. The spinning disk, free of other tasks, is much faster reading game files. Managing the meager amount of space on the SSD hasn't been worth the trouble of putting games on it. – Schwern Jan 14 '15 at 02:38
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    Keep in mind that if you fill you SSD beyond about 75% of it's capacity you'll start to notice a reduction in it's performance. I dropped over a whole point on the Windows Experience Index by nearly filling my SSD. – Ian Jan 14 '15 at 11:16
  • Not sure which games you want to install on your SSD but I've tested this with SC2. On HDD, the loading boot screen makes me wait 7 seconds. On SSD the loading boot screen makes me wait 6 seconds. I cannot justify using my SSD for such a meager improvement; maybe I should test this with Far Cry 1 haha. FWIW I have a Corsair GS 240 GB with ~500 read/write. My HDD is a WD Black 2 TB with ~150 read/write. I have about 600 GB worth of games on my D:\ drive. Skyrim also loads blazingly fast and I have at least 40 mods or so. Good luck! – MonkeyZeus Jan 14 '15 at 15:51
  • @MonkeyZeus Depends on if the loading process is CPU bound or not. You will only see significant improvement for IO bound operations. It'll depend on exactly what the game is doing behind the scenes during that "loading screen". If it is loading assets and having to do a significant amount of processing of those assets, then it might be CPU bound and in which case SSD won't offer much of an improvement. – AaronLS Jan 15 '15 at 01:00
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    I recommend not using symlinks ('junction points' as some call them) because I tried doing that with my AppData folder and it was hell. In comparison, I have actually partitioned my steam games into two libraries and it works just fine. I have considered just moving all the games to the hard drive and leaving just Steam on the SSD, but the one game I have left to move is TF2. – Pharap Jan 15 '15 at 04:38
  • @MonkeyZeus Not everything is a small improvement on SDD. For the most part games load noticeably faster. From my experiences of SSD performance on my previous machine, I built my new one with 2x 500GB SSD's and a Steam Library on each one. As Pharap says I would also advise against symbolic links. Steams library solution works well and you do not have to worry about messing around with directory linking at the operating system level. – kenjara Jan 15 '15 at 12:37
  • @AaronLS Yes, and I've listed out my experiences. – MonkeyZeus Jan 15 '15 at 14:29
  • @kenjara What was the HDD on your previous machine? – MonkeyZeus Jan 15 '15 at 14:31
  • @MonkeyZeus My older machine has a corsair sandisk extreme 256GB (very fast) with a Seagate barracuda 3TB. Both are good drives and perform well but I did notice a difference with the SSD. Dont forget not all SSD's are particularly good so performance does vary depending on brand/model. My new 500GB's are both Samsung Evo's. I have a steam library of just under 900 games and around 100 installed at any one time. – kenjara Jan 15 '15 at 14:35
  • @MonkeyZeus Another main factor on whether you get your full performance out of your SSD is whether your motherboard has SATA 2 or 3 ports. If the ports are SATA 2 then the speed of the SSD will be capped at SATA 2 speed. – kenjara Jan 15 '15 at 14:44
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    @kenjara You are correct, SATA 3 is faster than SATA 2, thanks. Don't forget to enable AHCI on all drives. I would be interested in knowing the speed benchmarks of your old system. – MonkeyZeus Jan 15 '15 at 14:54
  • @Kenjara It would have been even faster if you had those 2 SSDs in Raid 0 instead. – Jonathan Drapeau Jan 20 '15 at 12:43
  • @JonathanDrapeau True but I prefer not to loose all data if one fails. – kenjara Jan 20 '15 at 12:50

4 Answers4

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You can create multiple 'game libraries' in Steam, each one going in a different location on your computer, in your case, 2 different hard disks.

Nolonar adds a good point:

Keep in mind that not all games can be installed on a library other than where Steam is installed; most notably old games like Half-Life 2

How to

Steam > Settings > Downloads tab > Click 'Steam library folders' button.

Next time you download a game you can choose where to put it.

Look here for 2 ways to add the library.

Read this question if you want to move games between libraries.

Community
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Jonathan Drapeau
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    Keep in mind that not all games can be installed on a library other than where Steam is installed; most notably old games like Half-Life 2. I originally installed Steam on my SSD and wanted all games to be stored on my HDD, but had to move Steam from SSD to HDD because of that. – Nolonar Jan 13 '15 at 19:49
  • Even some new games fail to run this way! XCOM for example. – Nick Veys Jan 13 '15 at 22:03
  • @NickVeys It works fine on Windows. Those kinds of issues crop up all the time when people are doing "smart" things and don't test all the relevant edge cases. The much more important point is that you even got a response from a support team, that's awesome! – Luaan Jan 14 '15 at 09:46
  • Another added benefit of installing games to a non-OS drive is if you ever have to re-roll the OS drive, you can point your fresh Steam install to the install folder on your second drive and all your games will magically appear again. I had to do this after a mishap in toying around with dual booting Linux on my machine caused me to have to reinstall Windows due to a borked bootloader, and it was nice to have 95% of my games back without having to redownload them simply by pointing Steam to the install location I made on my D: drive. – MattD Jan 15 '15 at 14:48
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    @Nolonar Half-Life 2 being an old game. B-but that was just... 11 years ago?! Shiiiiiiiiiieeet. – Adam Jensen Jan 16 '15 at 05:27
  • I have been using a separate Steam library for over 2 years now. I only had issues with it when modding the Portal 2 level editor. So I would recommend installing all Source Engine games in the default Steam library, just to be sure. – Rudey Jan 20 '15 at 07:21
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Personally I use junction points. Install everything originally to the SSD as it is your base/original Steam install location then you can move the data folder and create a "junction point" to generate a virtual link to the new physical location of the game data. This really can be done for a lot of other things than SteamApps.

See: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2181335

And the example given is

 mklink /d "D:\program files\Steam\TF2" "C:\Steam\TF2"
Robotnik
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Shiv
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    This is what I do. As it's what you had to do before the Steam client add the multiple library features mentioned in Jonathan Drapeau's answer there are third party utilities specifically designed to manage these junction points for you. –  Jan 14 '15 at 03:17
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    I did that too for some games before finding about the libraries, which is less troublesome than symbolic links. Unfortunately, for some games it is the only way indeed. The transfer time to the new location is all that makes this less attractive. – Jonathan Drapeau Jan 14 '15 at 13:28
  • @JonathanDrapeau At least you don't have to redownload the games onto the new disk. Though I will admit the only game the transfer time has put me off moving is TF2. Not even sure how I managed to fit all the hats onto my SSD. – Pharap Jan 15 '15 at 04:34
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    Considering Steam now has an official way to solve this problem. I would advise against using symbolic links. Steams solution is easy and anyone can do it. Using symbolic links requires either third party software or use of commands that users may not be comfortable with. – kenjara Jan 15 '15 at 12:32
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    @kenjara The problem with Steam's official solution is that it makes it much harder to move games between drives. Officially you need to uninstall the game and reinstall it in the new location, though you can use the trick linked in Jonathan's answer instead. Either way, it's much easier and quicker to use one of the third party utilities to do the move. Since which games I want on my SSD at any given time depend on which games I'm currently playing, I like being able to easily move games. –  Jan 15 '15 at 19:06
  • @RossRidge I have not had to do it for a while but you always used to be able to just copy the files over and it will finish the job if anythings missing. Is this not the case anymore? – kenjara Jan 15 '15 at 19:22
  • @kenjara You seem to describing the (unofficial) method described in the post Jonathan's answer. Using a third party utility to manage where your games are installed makes the process of moving a game much easier. You also don't run into the problem of needing twice as much free space on the destination drive as the game requires. –  Jan 15 '15 at 20:06
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    @kenjara If you chop and change, with junction points, you don't have to worry about whether Steam's tool does the job nicely, redownloads etc. You have full control over where the content resides at any point in time without using a black box installer. – Shiv Jan 15 '15 at 23:39
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    @kenjara - The problem with Steam's library way is that it refuses to move a lot of older Source games: Half Life, TF2, CS: Source etc. Symbolic Links avoid that entirely. as far as Steam is concerned, it doesn't know the difference – Robotnik Nov 26 '15 at 01:36
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There is actually a utility someone created for just this reason. Steam Mover creates junction points and moves the actual game contents to a new location of your choosing and keeps track of moved games in a nice interface.

For your use case you might install all your games to your 1TB hdd, and then use Steam Mover to move select games for which you want to gain the advantages of ssd performance.

Nujay
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  • Haven't tried yet the Libraries method, but I ask you any way. This utility you mention has to be open/active all the time for it to work and for updates to know where to go? And also, how outdated is it? Because Steam changes things all the time and I can see a disk mess happening in the future. Thanks for your answer! – Magnamuz Jan 15 '15 at 19:14
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Each time you install a game from Steam, you can select where you want to install it. I have an SSD for my OS, but some of the larger games where performance isn't a huge deal go on a 1TB HDD. Every time I click the "install" button it prompts me for the location. Fortunately it remembers each location and offers them as default options.

Personally I wouldn't chance moving a game, and I've never used junction points (although they sound cool until something doesn't work with them, then they sound like a nightmare to troubleshoot) so I'd either verify the steam cloud has my save info, or copy off the save games then delete/reinstall the game on the other drive. I have no complaints thus far with that procedure. (Granted I did this after a fresh Windows install, so I had to reinstall everything in Steam anyway.)

Edit: I saw the answer about Steam Libraries -- and I wasn't sure if that was the same thing as what I just posted, so I left my answer anyway... if it is, then so be it.

Tim S.
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