Thread: Steam and Hard Disk Space

Do any of you have issues with running out of hard disk space due to the amount of games you have in your Steam directory?

If you are running a WD Raptor or Velociraptor, then you just may know what I am talking about. I have a 75 GB WD Raptor running my OS and powering my multi-player games from Steam. I also have 6 or 7 other Steam games that are on this drive, leaving me less than 10 GB worth of storage. I have a 640 WD Green drive for file storage.

I was able to find a way to save almost 25 GB of storage by creating Symbolic Links (Junctions) to my Steam Games. If you would like to do the same, just follow these simple steps:

Tip

1. Copy the game content onto a different partition or physical drive (ex: copy the directory "C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Far Cry 2" into a "D:\Games\Far Cry 2") 2. Delete the game content from the original directory (ex: delete the original directory "C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Far Cry 2") 3. Open up a Command Promt (must be logged in as an administrator) by going to Start -> Run -> type "cmd" -> press enter 4. The command line should be as follows: mklink /j "Link" "Target" ("mklink" is the command for making the link, "/J" identifies the link as a directory Junction, "Link" is where you want the link to be located - the old directory, and "Target" is the source of the link - the files you copied to the new directory). 5. It should look like this: mklink /j "C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Far Cry 2" "D:\Games\Far Cry 2" 6. Once you hit enter, it should give you the following output: "Junction created for C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Far Cry 2 <<===>> D:\Games\Far Cry 2

Now when Steam wants to access these games, it will use the Junction to point to my D:\, where the actual content is stored. This frees up storage on my main drive for other games and programs that I want to take advantage of the 10,000 RPM WD Raptor.

Note: This only works on games in the "common" directory. You can not use it for games such as Half Life 2, Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, etc. I used it to move both of my Call of Duty games, Bio Shock, and Far Cry 2, which ended up giving me back almost 25 GB.

Give it a shot if you want to free up some space on your primary drive.

Originally Posted by WileECyte

Here's a nifty utility that will let you move individual games to different drives from your Steam library. It uses the same technology as the solution displayed here (NTFS Junctions).

SteamTool Library Manager 1.1 - Stefan Jones

Good tip. That kind of thing almost needs a sticky.

My boot drive is a terabyte so I'm not worried about it but definitely worthwhile to some I'm sure.

Stickied...

Awesome tip! Sticky worthy for sure.

Why does steam make it so bloated?

I honestly don't know. I wish Steam would allow you to install games on multiple drives for just this reason... If you think about it though, the average hard drive storage on PCs is probably around 250-320 GB nowadays, so Valve might be assuming that nobody in their right mind would need more than that amount of storage for Steam games. I guess they forgot that people use PCs for other things besides gaming.

NOTE:
If you experience a drop in FPS, intermittent lag, or some other form of performance drop, it will be because you are trying to access the data through an external HD. If you're simply linking the data to another internal HD (or partition) you will probably not see a decrease in performance..

This was the first thing that came to mind when reading this.

Your not really taking advantage of the Raptor with symlinks, your still waiting on the slowest bit...

I would think it would be better to just put the whole steam folder on the other drive. Its ridiculously simple to do and will eliminate the back and forth between multiple drives



Just move the entire steam dir, then delete the “ClientRegistry.blob” file - launch steam from the newly moved folder, steam will build a new one and update the registry. Only thing to clean up is any shortcuts that may have been made

Originally Posted by Mcstrange

Your not really taking advantage of the Raptor with symlinks, your still waiting on the slowest bit...

I would think it would be better to just put the whole steam folder on the other drive. Its ridiculously simple to do and will eliminate the back and forth between multiple drives



Just move the entire steam dir, then delete the “ClientRegistry.blob” file - launch steam from the newly moved folder, steam will build a new one and update the registry. Only thing to clean up is any shortcuts that may have been made

Then in this case, all of my games would be pulled from the slower secondary drive. At least with the links, I can have my most played games load from the raptor and the other games from the secondary 7200 RPM drive.