With the ever-increasing volume of storage taken up by video games, it’s become imperative to have storage kicking around your gaming PC. Games can easily eclipse 100 GB in size now, and it’s only going to get more annoying to store these games. So let’s say you’re preparing ahead and just bought a new shiny SSD. A nice 2 TB SSD is a great upgrade for any gaming rig, and can easily store tons of games with lightning-fast load times.
So trouble is, how do you move Steam games from one drive to another? It used to be a lot harder before Valve streamlined the whole process. Here’s how it can be done quickly and easily.
To move a Steam game to another drive, you of course need to have the drive installed and formatted for your system. Say you’re moving your most-played games to an SSD to speed up load times, here’s how to do it for certain games. First things first, you need to create a new folder for Steam to store your game files in, here’s how.
Step One: Create a Second Steam Folder
For starters, let’s talk about how to actually set up a new Steam install folder. Steam makes this very easy.
- Open Steam
- Go to Settings and click on Steam Library Folders button, it’s under the Downloads sub-heading.
- Click on the Add Library Folder button and choose New Folder, you will get an option to type in the destination where you want to move the game.
- Once you name the new install folder, you’re ready to move on.
Now you’re ready to start moving games over, but don’t just drag and drop your Steam directory over. I mean, you could do that, but it involves a bit of a mess of making sure directory trees aren’t broken for your games. Here’s how to get Steam to do the heavy lifting for you.
Step Two: Move Files to The New Folder
When you’re ready to move games over, you need to then move them physically to the new drive. Steam can handle this for you, and it will be much simpler than copying files over and change drive assignments for files. Steam handles all of that for you, provided you use the right method.
- Right-click on the game you wish to move in your Library, select Properties.
- Under the Local Files tab, click on the Move Install Folder button.
- Change the menu to the new Steam drive you just created.
There. you’re done and can now install more games to that new drive.