Question about games on a second drive?

[buddies_fan]

Hi
First post here, so my first step in what I hope is a long journey with you guys.

I see posts on here where if I'm reading them right, it's suggested that games are stored on a separate drive so that if a format of windows is required, at least the games won't need to be downloaded again. So first question is have I got that right? Second question is do the games not need to be reinstalled in order to dump there stuff into windows system folder etc? Nearly all my games are from steam or gog, and at least with steam I have a backup of the whole steam folder. Can I just install steam on my new pc and then copy over the backup folder and I'm ready to go? Sounds to good to be true😄

Thanks in anticipation...

 

[TonyCarter]

Your first point is correct...mostly. It's also to ensure the OS processes and the games processes are not trying to access the same resources (i.e. the same SSD) at the same time...as this just means the access requests are queued and could cause delays/stuttering.

Why more than one storage drive?

I've been meaning to put something like this together for a while. In recent weeks I've found myself writing this more and more so thought I would just post my thoughts in a thread that I could link to. So the reason for this thread is to try and give insight as to the reasoning behind having...

www.pcspecialist.co.uk

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Where are you currently storing the backup of your complete Steam folder?

If that's on the OS drive then you'll lose that too if you have to reinstall Windows.

If it's already on a second drive, then you're more or less doing what we suggest anyway - except your using double the space (OS drive and backup drive) - and it will still take time to move it all back over and re-verify the contents...one by one usually.

 

[SpyderTracks]

With steam, you can simply install it, and then point it to a games folder, could be on any drive on your system.

Steam>Settings>Downloads>Steam Library Folders>Click the plus sign to add a drive> Select "Let me choose another location"> manually select the correct drive and navigate to your old "SteamLibrary" Folder and hit OK. This should auto load everything into your library.

That will then rescan them all and make them available for use in Steam.

This is the same with any games launcher.

 

[buddies_fan]

Your first point is correct...mostly. It's also to ensure the OS processes and the games processes are not trying to access the same resources (i.e. the same SSD) at the same time...as this just means the access requests are queued and could cause delays/stuttering.

Why more than one storage drive?

I've been meaning to put something like this together for a while. In recent weeks I've found myself writing this more and more so thought I would just post my thoughts in a thread that I could link to. So the reason for this thread is to try and give insight as to the reasoning behind having...

www.pcspecialist.co.uk

---

Where are you currently storing the backup of your complete Steam folder?

If that's on the OS drive then you'll lose that too if you have to reinstall Windows.

If it's already on a second drive, then you're more or less doing what we suggest anyway - except your using double the space (OS drive and backup drive) - and it will still take time to move it all back over and re-verify the contents...one by one usually.

Thankfully they're just on the second drive. But if I hadn't been reading this forum I'd have installed them all again from scratch on the new pc, DOH!