Where do you install all your games?

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kinein

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 10, 2010
Messages
237
This may sound stupid but, for those of you that buy a lot of games on Steam.

Do you just reserve your boot drive for all your games ( especially those with an SSD )?

Or do you install them on your 2nd 3rd 4th drives?

I have a 500mb Samsung drive not a SSD as my C drive.
 
I have all my Steam games on a 2tb Samsung drive. That way when I have to re-install the OS I just run steam.exe and all my games are back without needing to download them again.
 
I have them mostly on a 1 TB HDD. However, some games I want to keep on my SSD (especially MP games such as BF4 or Ghosts).
 
I have a 128GB SSD that is for my OS and most apps.
256GB SSD is used for my current Steam and Origin games, and Adobe Suite
2TB WD Black Drive holds the rest of my Steam Games, and the Origin games I am not playing (they are there so I don't have to re-download them, as they were on the 256GB SSD but they don't fit with the addition of the Crysis 3, BF4, and COD Ghosts games, those 3 games are over 70GB).
 
I can't afford an SSD for games yet as I require close to 1TB. So I'm using a 2TB WD Black hard disk for all my video games
 
I mix and match depending on the game. Most of my games are on my 1TB HDD while some are on my 250GB 840. Putting BF4 on a SSD has drastically reduced the load times.

I've also been using the Intel G2 80GB as a boot drive and random app drive for years.
 
steam is on a second HDD, music and pictures on another HDD. Ssd is for boot and my main apps.
 
I have all of my games on my RAID0 disk. My OS SSD is only 60GB. A lot of game load time is data decompression by your CPU (as opposed to strictly disk read). Faster drives always help, but I never noticed much difference between my RAID0 and having them on my SSD. i.e., I never cared all that much to spend a lot on larger SSD's just for game load times. But that's just me.
 
I bought a large SSD just so I could keep everything together. Going way, way, way back I've always kept all of my games in C:\Games\
 
One smaller SSD for the OS and related programs. One SSD, larger, strictly for games. One drive for misc/non critical stuff and local storage. Several drives for network media.
 
I just download my games then use Steam backup and throw them onto my NAS and if i wanna play them i have a 1TB WD Blue drive
 
I only use a single HDD aside from a backup one. So all are on my 2TB WD black drive. I am looking to get an SSD, but 240GB just seems too small. BF4 is already 30GB, and some other games I would consider loading on them are 12-15GB.
 
Steam games go to my SSD and get moved to hard drive when finished with. If I want to play them again they can be run from the hard drive or are copied back to the SSD.
Other games get installed to hard drive and moved to SSD if they are slow at loading. They also get put back on hard drive or deleted when finished with.

This keeps some free space on the SSD.
 
I split my steam library. Most commonly used games are installed on my ssd, all the others are on one of my 4 tb drives.
 
Hornet said:
I can't afford an SSD for games yet as I require close to 1TB. So I'm using a 2TB WD Black hard disk for all my video games
Click to expand...

The Samsung EVO 1TB SSD is getting more affordable everyday. I just picked one up from Amazon and threw it in last night. It comes with a nice migration software, so no need to reinstall anything. I'm glad I made this purchase because now I can have quite a few more games installed on the SSD.

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-EVO-Series-2-5-Inch-MZ-7TE1T0BW/dp/B00E3W16OU

What convinced me to upgrade capacity from 480GB was losing my progress in Splinter Cell Blacklist. I beat the game and had everything unlocked, but uninstalled it for space. When I reinstalled it, the Uplay cloud saves had lost all my progress - LAME! So in short, not going to happen again with 1TB Samsung.
 
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A single dedicated 3TB 7200 RPM drive. For me I won't waste SSD space for a game. I'll change my mind when I can buy a 3TB SSD for $100 ;).
 
I have a 250GB SSD just for games and put the games I play a lot on that, otherwise I install them to a 2TB hard drive I have dedicated to miscellaneous Programs.
I also have a separate 250GB SSD for Windows and another 2TB HDD for file storage.

I wouldn't use an SSD for all your games unless you have a lot of money to spend. But I would use an SSD for your boot drive with your web browser and maybe a game or two.
 
I have them on a secondary drive (SSD as boot drive). This has saved me some time, as when I reload Windows I can just point Steam to the D:\ directory and all the games are there. Sadly, I've had to uninstall a bunch due to lack of space. 1TB just doesn't cut it anymore. I need more storage.
 
Thank you all for commenting! :D I think I'll invest in a new 2TB just to hold all my games.
 
On my primary disk. I have a 512GB SSD that is OS, apps, and games. I find it large enough I can have a good contingent of games installed and still have plenty of space. I like the convenience of everything on one, fast, drive. I like games on an SSD because it makes them load lightning fast and all that. I've never gotten the idea of putting an OS on an SSD for fast boots, which I don't do that often anyhow, then apps on a slower drive.
 
I had an ssd and 2tb WD black drive before steam started offering the option to install games to an alternative location, so I created a symbolic link from the steamapps folder on my C: drive to the black drive on D:.
 
I put the games I'm currently playing on my 128GB SSD. If I'm done playing it regularly but don't want to uninstall, I move it to my 1TB storage drive.
 
Currently all my steam games are on my 1tb main drive.
They all used to be on their own dedicated drive but then I built a second machine and used my steam drive as the os drive. I intend to purchase a 2tb drive and move all my steam data over.
 
I have a 120 gig SSD as my OS drive, and I have the new Sim City installed on it, but that's it. My Steam games install on a 500 gig HD.
 
My Steam and Origin games are on a 512 GB SSD which is almost full. I need to pull several games off it because I am not playing that many.
 
I have a small ssd (128gb) that I use to install special games to (usually new/bigger games that would make use of it, IE - I currently have Assassin's Creed IV and Total War: Rome 2 installed to it).

For most of my other games though they go to my other drive which is an SATA but a lot lot bigger.
 
I have all of my games on one of my Samsung F3 drives. I would put it on an SSD but with almost 200 games I don't want to reinstall them around all the time.
 
Just so everyone knows, you might want to reconsider the Kingston Now V300 series (or whatever it's called) SSD drives. They 120 gig drive has been on sale lately, and it has some lag periodically when it writes large quantity of data to it. It's great to read off of, but writing to will cause you some minor problems, like a download or an install.
 
Those Crucial SSDs on sale on Amazon are nice performers at good prices.
 
I keep everything on a 300GB WD Velociraptor. Cheaper than an SSD, still pretty fast, good amount of space. My SSD is only 32GB (I bought it back when SSDs first came out) so yeah I have no space to put it on the C:\ drive.
 
Steam games are on a 1.5TB 7200RPM drive. My primary OS drive shares space with my origin install now for BF4 load times, thats the only game on my SSD.
 
At first I only installed RAGE and SC2 on my SSD but now pretty much everything that I play is on it.

HDDs are only good for storing my collection of Linux distros :)
 
I have usually 1 game installed on my main OS SSD. Everything else gamewise is installed on SATA. Also, I only ever have 3 games at most installed at once. No sense in having more, I dont like to be spread thin. I like to focus on what I'm playing, which is usually 1 main game, with a second for changing it up on odd nights.
 
Oh my.

There's a steam tree on a local SSD with few games and one on a large network drive with many games.

The desktop icon for steam usually points to the one on the network drive. If I don't like that for whatever game is in fashion right now I let it patch on the network drive, shut down steam, copy the files to the SSD and then call the other desktop icon which points to the SSD tree.
 
I started off with a single Steam SSD (the OS has its own SSD for programs, etc.), then I kept adding more as prices came down. I am up to around 500 MB for Steam now, nothing too crazy. Past my 500 MB of SSD storage, I don't bother with another archive drive.
 
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