Steam's Fatal Flaw?

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Blackstone

Supreme [H]ardness
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Mar 8, 2007
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I am starting to become aware of a major flaw in Valve's Steam game distribution system. Unless I am mistaken, there is no way to divide Steam games among more than one hard drive. In other words, you can't have Crysis on C drive and Half-Life 2 on D drive. This could be a problem when you use a small fast drive like a Raptor or SSD; or you run out of space and need to expand.
 
Blackstone said:
I am starting to become aware of a major flaw in Valve's Steam game distribution system. Unless I am mistaken, there is no way to divide Steam games among more than one hard drive. In other words, you can't have Crysis on C drive and Half-Life 2 on D drive. This could be a problem when you use a small fast drive like a Raptor or SSD; or you run out of space and need to expand.
Click to expand...

If you run out of space, get a larger drive and move the Steam Folder there and then reinstall steam and point the install to the new location and you are good to go.
 
Zepher said:
If you run out of space, get a larger drive and move the Steam Folder there and then reinstall steam and point the install to the new location and you are good to go.
Click to expand...

You are missing the point. The point is small, fast drives like Raptors or SSDs. You might want some games on the smaller faster drive and other less critical games on the larger mass storage drives.
 
Sure it would be nice, but I wouldn't call it a flaw.

If you have small fast drives, get more then one and raid them.
 
If Steam doesn't fix it, buy games (that activate with Steam a lá FEAR2) that you feel aren't so critical on optical media, then use the installer to shoot them where you want them.

EDIT - or, like JohnleMVP said, get more then one speedy drive and RAID them.
 
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I map folders for steam games on alternate hard drives using the function included with NTFS. That way I can have steam games to the desired drive.

Start to download the game you want so the game folder is created in "steamapps"
Close Steam.
Delete all the files in the folder.
Map the game folder to another hard drive (game folder must be empty that's why you close steam and delete the files) in the Storage manager in windows.
Re-start steam and the download, the files will now transparently install their files to the second HDD.

Of course if Steam was programed to allow us to chose where to save games thats would be easier but it's still doable today.

What I don't understand is why they removed that function because in the first version of steam you could chose where to place games and they removed that feature.
 
Blackstone said:
I am starting to become aware of a major flaw in Valve's Steam game distribution system. Unless I am mistaken, there is no way to divide Steam games among more than one hard drive. In other words, you can't have Crysis on C drive and Half-Life 2 on D drive. This could be a problem when you use a small fast drive like a Raptor or SSD; or you run out of space and need to expand.
Click to expand...

Rightclick --> Backup Game Files --> Back them up on an external drive

Then just reinstall when you plan on playing it. Using Steam on a 60gb OCZ Agility SSD, have not had any problems so far.
 
i have a dedicated games drive. 320gb is a shitload of space for games even at 10gb+ a game.

its not a fatal flaw at all as I see it, i dont even see it as an issue let alone a flaw.
 
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