Put steam on SSD or HDD

I

ianwri

Member
Hi
I should receive my laptop sometime tomorrow as it’s with DPD now.

I just wondered as I’ve never had a SSD before: (256GB INTEL® 760p M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (upto 3210MB/sR | 1315MB/sW)
should I put steam on that drive or on the: 1TB SEAGATE 7mm SERIAL ATA III 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 128MB CACHE (7,200rpm)?

I only will use it for gaming, I don’t even put photos, music on my gaming laptop, come to think of it I don’t even use it to surf the web really.

The main game I play is ‘War Thunder’ and there is usually a decent size update every other week or so (takes about 30mins give or take 10mins every update) which drive should I put this on?
One thing to mention, the windows 10 is on the SSD as recommended by PCS.
Thanks in advance..
 
stegor

stegor

Bright Spark
ianwri said:
Hi
I should receive my laptop sometime tomorrow as it’s with DPD now.

I just wondered as I’ve never had a SSD before: (256GB INTEL® 760p M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (upto 3210MB/sR | 1315MB/sW)
should I put steam on that drive or on the: 1TB SEAGATE 7mm SERIAL ATA III 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 128MB CACHE (7,200rpm)?

I only will use it for gaming, I don’t even put photos, music on my gaming laptop, come to think of it I don’t even use it to surf the web really.

The main game I play is ‘War Thunder’ and there is usually a decent size update every other week or so (takes about 30mins give or take 10mins every update) which drive should I put this on?
One thing to mention, the windows 10 is on the SSD as recommended by PCS.
Thanks in advance..
Click to expand...

I would put steam on the HDD. If you want any 1 game to load faster then you can choose to put it on the SSD from within steam.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
SSD. All programs on the SSD.

Once you have installed Steam you can create 2 libraries in Steam (or as many as you like), one for your SSD, one for your HDD.

Your favourite games on the SSD. Any other games can go on the HDD. And you can swap games between libraries / drives at will, with a few mouse clicks.

I don't have the official steam support article to hand, but this will give you the details: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/qu...-large-hdd-but-some-popular-games-on-a-separa
 
polycrac

polycrac

Super Star
You can set up two steam libraries, one on the SSD and another on the HDD. I do, with the games I play most on the fast one and the rest (especially the ones where loading times don't matter) on the slower.

Once you have them set up, the library you see on Steam shows both sources, all together. As you download new games you can put them on whichever you like and you can move games between them easily.


***edit: ninja'd!***
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Steammover is kind of obsolete as far as Steam goes, now that the function has been built into steam isn't it?

You just go to the game properties, local files, and move it.
 
polycrac

polycrac

Super Star
Oussebon said:
Steammover is kind of obsolete as far as Steam goes, now that the function has been built into steam isn't it?

You just go to the game properties, local files, and move it.
Click to expand...

I confess, I've never done that & didn't know I could - I am a dinosaur :(
 
I

ianwri

Member
Oussebon said:
SSD. All programs on the SSD.

Once you have installed Steam you can create 2 libraries in Steam (or as many as you like), one for your SSD, one for your HDD.

Your favourite games on the SSD. Any other games can go on the HDD. And you can swap games between libraries / drives at will, with a few mouse clicks.

I don't have the official steam support article to hand, but this will give you the details: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/qu...-large-hdd-but-some-popular-games-on-a-separa
Click to expand...

Oussebon, that’s amazing advice, I guess a few will benefit from this, not just me. Thanks very much.
Thanks for everyone else’s input too. Every day is a school day!
 
stegor

stegor

Bright Spark
Oussebon said:
SSD. All programs on the SSD.

Once you have installed Steam you can create 2 libraries in Steam (or as many as you like), one for your SSD, one for your HDD.

Your favourite games on the SSD. Any other games can go on the HDD. And you can swap games between libraries / drives at will, with a few mouse clicks.

I don't have the official steam support article to hand, but this will give you the details: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/qu...-large-hdd-but-some-popular-games-on-a-separa
Click to expand...

I agree with some of the above, but that 250GB will disappear pretty quickly given the size of programmes today and Windows bloating over time. Unless you are prepared to re-install Windows after a couple of years, I would be careful with that space, or upgrade to 500GB.
Some on here would say re-install Windows regularly but I think it's too much of a faff.
 
I

ianwri

Member
stegor said:
but that 250GB will disappear pretty quickly given the size of programmes today and Windows bloating over time.
Click to expand...

yep, I know what you are saying, I only had a 500gb hd before and i'd used about 70% of it but I did have photos etc. on there as well as games, I'll put a few regular games on the ssd and the rest on the 1tb and just keep an eye on it, already done a load of windows updates today straight from box!
cheers me old dinosaur!
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
ianwri said:
yep, I know what you are saying, I only had a 500gb hd before and i'd used about 70% of it but I did have photos etc. on there as well as games, I'll put a few regular games on the ssd and the rest on the 1tb and just keep an eye on it, already done a load of windows updates today straight from box!
cheers me old dinosaur!
Click to expand...

I would agree 500Gb is pretty much the minimum for OS and games.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I certainly agree that it's wise to manage space, and that reinstalling Windows can be a faff (I haven't done a clean install since mid-2016, and I'm well overdue one). But there are other, better ways to manage space

My 1TB SSD gets quite full when I get lazy but that's exclusively down to not being bothered to moving games or saved video files/save games off there. If you leave 10gb of Fallout 4 save files in your appdata folder, or 100gb of uncut Shadowplay recordings, space suffers.

However, things like save games almost always live in the Documents or Appdata folder rather than the steam userdata folder or the Steam game installation folder - so it wouldn't matter much where one had installed Steam anyway. Likewise Thunderbird profiles, Outlook data files, etc end up in Appdata by default rather than the program installation directory (unless you use portable Thunderbird, obvs)

I suppose if one took 10,000 screenshots in Steam games, the Steam Userdata folder would eventually get quite large due to the jpgs. That said, photo collections load faster off an SSD... though they can be moved to the HDD is desired.

Games can be huge, and need to be swapped between drives / uninstalled, no two ways about that. But I think regular programs (office suites, media players, and the essentials like 7zip) are relatively small versus 250gb, would that not be fair to say?
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
This 240gb Intel 520 SSD set up for working from home has 126/222gb free; including ~30gb Sharepoint files, multiple email clients browsers/ configured with local profiles for various tasks(8gb), 9gb for a work Outlook data file. Most home users won't have that, so knock off 40gb there for home users. It has media players, steam, and various other bits installed too; it's not just work.

Edit: 130gb free after cleaning up 'system restore and shadow copies', 132gb after emptying the recycle bin.

170gb is a frugal amount of free space for games and saves files but you can certainly do it as long as you shuffle games between drives and remember to empty the bin :)

I'm not naturally frugal with PC space, which is why I bought a 1TB SSD in 2014, and a 2TB SSD last week, but if you do as I say rather than do as I do, you can get away with it...
 
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