In need of SSD-advice (installing seperate games, that use origin/steam, on the SSD)

jason_28

Honorable
Feb 6, 2013
2
0
10,510
Greetings everyone!

First of all, my apologies if this has already been asked before. I've tried looking around for a similar case, but I haven't found an article that exactly answered my question.

I'm getting an SSD tomorrow, my first SSD ever. The installation, enabling TRIM-support and enabling AHCI looks easy enough (even though that will make tomorrow an adventurous day). But that's not the thing.

I'm getting the SSD purely for loading-times in games. I'm not too interested in putting my OS on it, I only boot up/shut off my pc once every few days or so. However, the games I play almost all use origin/steam. I can't put all my games on the SSD, that would just take too much space up seeing how my steam/origin library is just too big.

I've heard about steam mover to swap games from my HDD to my SSD. But my question is: Is that application, or any other, suitable for moving only a few games from hdd to ssd with those moved games getting the full benefit of the speed of the SSD while origin/steam (and the non-moved games) are still sitting in the HDD?

Greetings, and early thanks to anyone kind enough to help me out with this!
 
Solution
You will be making a mistake if you do not put the os on your new ssd.
It makes everything you do quicker.
If your new ssd is 120gb, then it will hold the os and a handful of games. Better yet is 240gb which can hold quite a number of games.
As to steam, I am no expert on that.
But if there is an app that will swap games to the ssd so you can play it for a while, that seems reasonable to me.
If you do not have 16gb, you might look into the benefits of that.
Here is an older link showing the benefits of 8gb vs. 4gb including game level load times:
http://www.corsair.com/blog/an902-8gb-or-more-of-system-ram-doing-more-with-more-memory/

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Not putting the OS negates many of the benefits of having the SSD. It's not just boot time, but everything else is snappier.

With a 128GB SSD, for instance, you can install the OS and several games on it.

The way you describe - having the Steam client on the HDD, and the games on the SSD - is non optimal because the Steam client still has to process. And being on th HDD, will be slower.
Yes, probably 'faster'. But not as fast as it could be.
 
You will be making a mistake if you do not put the os on your new ssd.
It makes everything you do quicker.
If your new ssd is 120gb, then it will hold the os and a handful of games. Better yet is 240gb which can hold quite a number of games.
As to steam, I am no expert on that.
But if there is an app that will swap games to the ssd so you can play it for a while, that seems reasonable to me.
If you do not have 16gb, you might look into the benefits of that.
Here is an older link showing the benefits of 8gb vs. 4gb including game level load times:
http://www.corsair.com/blog/an902-8gb-or-more-of-system-ram-doing-more-with-more-memory/
 
Solution