Steam on multiple harddrives.

[satan]

Dont know if this has been bought up before (or if this is the right forum), but here goes.

I am getting a couple of SSD's to make a raid drive so I can hopefully get rid of lag im experiencing by having my steam folder on a nearly full 1tb HDD. Problem is after i reinstall steam on the new drive im only going to have 240 gb's of space, currently my steam folder is around 700gb's.

I've done a bit of reasearch and found a console cmd in windows 7 "mklink" which I believe means I can have the games that i need low latency for online gaming on the new drive (TF2, dod etc) and move my "common" folder (one taking up about 600gb space) back to the original 1tb hdd and link it to the ssd drive (making steam think its still on ssd)

Is this right/has anyone else done this/does it work ?

thanks

[King_Rocket]

http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/...-question.html
This might help.

[guv..]

Satan I use steammover and it works fine.

I've got a small SSD so I can't keep all the files on it. I move all of the games that won't benefit as much (ie they load fast anyways cos they are old) and SP stuff to my storage drives and keep TF2 on the SSD along with the latest games I actually play.

It works fine and quick, if you want to move something back to the SSD that's easy too.

I haven't played around too much with it but as you state it looks for games in the common folder so I haven't been able to make it detect and move Valve stuff . It's probably just user error I dunno but it has freed up a lot of space on the SSD for me.

[shock_]

I do that -- windows 7 directory junctions.

I can have the games that i need low latency for online gaming on the new drive (TF2, dod etc)

Running a multiplayer game from an SSD isn't going to affect your ping. It might help with map load times, and even then I've found some games where it makes little difference.

That said ... my Steam directory is installed on a normal HDD and if I want to run a game from the small amount of space I have left on the SSD, I copy the game's directory over there.

Will use "H" as normal HDD with steam installed and "S" as your SSD drive for the example.

From a CMD window (I can't remember if you need to be an administrator)

1) Copy the game to your SSD
copy H:\steam\steamapps\common\borderlands

paste S:\steam-games\borderlands

2) Rename the copy of it on your HDD (so you can quickly bring it back later)
ren H:\steam\steamapps\common\borderlands H:\steam\steamapps\common\borderlands-is-junctioned

3) Create the junction like this
mklink /j H:\steam\steamapps\common\borderlands S:\steam-games\borderlands


To test it, you can create a dummy text file in your SSD directory, then browse via your HDD directory (the junction) and you'll see it there as if it's really living on the HDD.

NB - steam updates will apply to the SSD version so if/when you want to bring it back and free up more space for other games on the SSD, either copy the files from SSD back over the top of your "borderlands-junctioned" backup copy to bring it back up to date, or let steam verify the game and redownload the updates.

To remove the junction when you're done with it:
rd H:\steam\steamapps\common\borderlands

This obviously works fine for non-SSD drives as well if you just need to split your steamapps to more drives because you're running out of room.

I don't know how well this works on Vista - I have some vague recollection that there was something wrong with the way it was implemented there but I skipped Vista so you're on your own there

And just to throw some more content into my megapost: Here's a video comparing load times on different drives

[satan]

Thanks to everyone who replied, including Mixa who also pointed me to steammover over chat just after i had posted. The latency i was talking about was the seek time to my hdd, not the Ping latency (i get 14 ping to most servers when i set my adsl2 profile properly), i probably used the term loosely.
Going to do a full system restore when I put in new ssd's so im going to back up all the games then move them back one at a time and then steammove them.