Thinking what would be the best way to split my drive into an OS and Game drive.

[Cyber Akuma]

I wasn't sure what would be the best sub-forum here to ask this on, it's not really an os question, hope this is the right one.

Currently my OS as well as my Steam and Battle.net launchers, and a few non-launcher games, are all on the same drive. Said drive is two 1TB SSDs in RAID0 (yeah yeah I know, old setup), so a total of 2TB.

Anyway, I want to separate these into an "os" drive and a "game" drive. I am rebuilding the system with a new motherboard that has NVME slots, so I figured I could toss an 1TB NVME in there and that would be more than enough for the OS and my other apps (My Steam folder definitely takes up nearly the entire RAID), move everything except my games to the NVME, and keep using said RAID0 purely to store my game installs (at least until I can replace that RAID0 with a larger single NVME as well and completely stop using a RAID0).

Thing is, I don't want to just move my entire Steam folder from Program Files because I DO want the client itself and all it's supporting data (and what I assume are screenshots and such) to remain on the OS drive, I only want the games themselves (which take up about 98% of the drive) separate. This will make backups a lot easier and smaller since I would only need to backup the OS drive to still keep all of my non-game steam data and settings, and the games can just simply be re-downloaded.

Is there any easy way to do this?

From what I can think up myself, I would have to connect some temp empty drive that is at least as big as said RAID0, move the steam games to that so that my OS drive can be shrunk to 1TB or less, clone it to the NVME, and then format the RAID0 and move all the steam games from the temp drive back to that.

The only issue with this method is that it would take forever to move all the installed games one-by-one as I have hundreds, AFAIK Steam has no built-in batch move feature, and the backup feature could miss some 3rd party files as well as need even more space to do. Is there any easier way to do all this without manually moving each installed game to a different drive, and then manually move them all back?

EDIT: I also realized that I could skip the last step by cloning the temp drive with my games to the RAID0 so I don't have to manually move them all back, but that still has the time-consuming step of manually moving them all to the temp drive in the first place.

 

[Zepher]

Steam is good with importing the games from where ever you move them to so just do what you are thinking about doing and it should be fine.

 

[Comixbooks]

You know if you right click on a game you can move it go any other installed drive. I'm not sure you could save your screenshots you could upload some of them to steam cloud. The problem is the drives are in Raid configuration? I would just uninstall games untill they fit or buy a bigger SSD then planned.

You can also move the entire Steam folder the common folder at one time would take about 45 minutes. Then point the Steam directory to the new place.

I'm on a slow internet myself so
downloading games is a big pain.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

You know if you right click on a game you can move it go any other installed drive. I'm not sure you could save your screenshots you could upload some of them to steam cloud.

Yeah I know, that's what I said I was going to do, but if you have hundreds of games installed that takes a long time to do them one-by-one. I wanted to know if there was a way to mass-do them all. But I do NOT want my screenshots, savegames, and other such data moved, only the games.

You can also move the entire Steam folder the common folder at one time would take about 45 minutes. Then point the Steam directory to the new place.

I don't know if that's enough, if there is other data in other folders that some games might need, or if moving that would also move the other data I mentioned I don't want moved.

 

[Denpepe]

Yeah I know, that's what I said I was going to do, but if you have hundreds of games installed that takes a long time to do them one-by-one. I wanted to know if there was a way to mass-do them all.

Just copy the whole "common" map that's in your steamfolder which has all the games in it?

 

[FighterAce124]

You can resize drive partitions using the windows drive management that's park of disk manager. It had some limitations like I can only add partitions to empty space at the end of the drive partitions so you may not be able to do exactly what you want but it's worth looking at.

Even easier is just install windows on one drive, move steam program itself to that drive, and then use the library function in steam to add the folder with the games from the old drive. It'll then detect the games in that library and add them back to the launcher. all game data is in the common folder with the exception of some saved games which are all stored different places by the game itself. Once you point the steam library to a directory and it scans, if something is somehow missing, it automatically ques that part of whatever he to redownload
I have steam installed on my os drive and the bulk of my games on a storage ssd and have no issues reformatting and then pointing a new steam install to the directory on the storage drive and getting back to playing within minutes of the is booting for the first time. All it has to reinstall usually is the .net packs and stuff - which are already in most game installed folders and thus it runs them when trying to start

 

[Ebernanut]

Steam libraries makes it easy to move games around and even seamlessly split them between multiple drives. I usually have a few games installed to my nvme boot drive and the bulk installed to an ssd and regularly move them between the drives.

I would get steam installed(or moved minus the steamapps folder), create a steam library on the other drive, copy the steamapps folder into the steam library folder and steam should auto-detect all of them. Personally I'd break up that raid array and just use multiple steam libraries(assuming I had a storage drive big enough to temporarily copy the games and any other content to) but that's a personal preference.