Installing Steam games to multiple drives

[djsprinkle]

So I just bought a 120GB Revodrive SSD and I was looking forward to fast boot times and playing some games with blazing fast saving and loading, Civ 5 especially. I started a thread on the Steam forums here http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=18467496#post18467496

Apparently there is no normal way to separate specific Steam games onto a separate drive since Steam has to access all games from the same steamapps folder. My whole Steam directory is over 160GB so I can't put the whole thing on my SSD, nor would I want to. There are only a handful of games that would benefit from the increased speed. So far my only solution was to reinstall Steam on the new drive and delete 90% of my games. This leaves me unable to play most of my collection unless I reinstall them, and no room or desire to ever buy another Steam game. What really irks me is that Civ 5 is only available on Steam.

A moderator on the Steam forum hinted at possible 3rd party solutions to remedy my problem but I can find no such solution. Has anyone encountered this problem and figured out a work-around or know of a 3rd party solution?

 

[djsprinkle]

Yeah that's actually what I'm doing for now. I have the backups on my large disk and Steam with a few games on the SSD. It works but it's annoying to have to switch things in and out to play them, and it discourages me from playing games that aren't already on installed.

 

[MockingbirdUK]

I realise it's more a workaround than a solution, but would it be fasible to have multiple installs of STEAM using different steamapps folders?

Either via multiple installs for one logon, or creating a second logon for the other copy?

 

[djsprinkle]

I tried that but it doesn't work. Only one install of Steam will work properly. I don't understand why but when I started it from my second install it would still load the games from the first install. If I removed the games from the first install, they were not available at all, even though I copied them to the new steamapps folder.

My original thread has been getting some attention and it looks like there may be a fix by using NTFS junctions. I haven't tried it yet but here is are some promising instructions. http://www.overclock.net/ssd/825342-moving-steam-games-onto-your-ssd.html

 

[MockingbirdUK]

Ah, to copy to the new setup, copy to the steamapps folder and then delete the clientregistry.blob (I think it's that) - this will cause steam to re-check the folder and register that they are in there.

 

[bugmenot1983]

Please try this fix (from the steam-forum):
Split Steam folder

 

[djsprinkle]

Best answer selected by Djsprinkle.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey