Steam/Origin installing confusion

[WillSK]

Hi guys,

Just built my first gaming pc took hours but generally went well. Have an SSD boot and a hard disk secondary drive and just wanted to know how to go about installing games so they dont take up a rediculous amount of my SSD. In particular how do i go about this with origin and steam. Do i install these to the SSD or the HDD? can i have some steam/origin games on the SSD and some on the HDD.

just generally a bit confused about how to go about doing this so any advice or help would be hugely appreciated

thanks in advance

Will

 

[yassarikhan786]

As far as I know you can only install the Games on one particular hard-drive. You can easily move games from Disk-to-Disk on Steam, but for Origin I think you have to re-download/install all of the games if you want to have them on another Hard-drive, although don't quote me on that.

 

[WillSK]

so would you advise based on your knowledge to install origin to my second hard drive since the benefit of SSD in games is minimal anyway aside from loading times?

 

[yassarikhan786]

so would you advise based on your knowledge to install origin to my second hard drive since the benefit of SSD in games is minimal anyway aside from loading times?

Yeh, the hard-drive only affects the loading times so install them on your hard-drive if you don't mind waiting a bit longer. What hard-drive are you using for your secondary storage?

 

[WillSK]

Yeh, the hard-drive only affects the loading times so install them on your hard-drive if you don't mind waiting a bit longer. What hard-drive are you using for your secondary storage?

Well my primary is a corsair 120gb force 3 & secondary is a seagate barracuda .12 1TB

if i were to install steam + origin to my secondary would i need to create programme folders or will it automatically sort that for me

 

[yassarikhan786]

The installation wizard will create a default file location for Steam and Origin when you install them. All you have to do is specify folders on your secondary drive, so that the programs get installed there. When downloading the games, by default they will be downloaded to your primary drive and you would have to change the download locations via the settings on both Steam and Origin.

 

[WillSK]

thanks mate you've been a great help

 

[yassarikhan786]

No problem dude.

 

[fcb]

I've never really played around with the Steam folder, but I think you can find most of your downloaded Steam games in the steamapps folder inside the main Steam folder. You should be able backup your games on different hard drives, but you'd have to pit them back into the Steam folder eventually when you do play/reactivate the games.

Please correct me if I'm wrong guys.

 

[WhiskeyShot]

Looking for help. I have same issue as OP.

I used to have both Steam and Origin apps installed on my HDD, but moved to my SSD. I successfully learned how to use symbolic mklink junctions to point Steam towards the Steamapps folder that I left on my HDD. This way I can keep my single player games on my HDD and keep only my multiplayer games (where quick loading into maps is helpful) on my SSD.

I am trying to figure out a way to do this successfully on Origin. Origin is much newer than Steam and there are not a lot of web postings about this issue. The concensus is that you need to have your games installed on the same drive as Origin.

Anyone know about this?

 

[Murdolator]

Anyone know about this?

I haven't tried it myself (no SSD

) but the forum post i've linked below seems to imply that it's possible and can work with Origin.

Origin/Steam SSD Symlink

Apologies if this is covering things you already know.

 

[WhiskeyShot]

I haven't tried it myself (no SSD

) but the forum post i've linked below seems to imply that it's possible and can work with Origin.

Origin/Steam SSD Symlink

Apologies if this is covering things you already know.

Thanks for the post. It's encouraging that someone was able to do it successfully on Origin. I'm away from my home computer right now, but will mess around with it some more when I get home. I'll try pm'ing this guy to get specifics on any issues he ran into on Origin (where the directory junction appears to be partially successful in that Origin recognizes that it's at least 'downloaded', but not yet 'installed').

 

[Murdolator]

Thanks for the post. It's encouraging that someone was able to do it successfully on Origin. I'm away from my home computer right now, but will mess around with it some more when I get home. I'll try pm'ing this guy to get specifics on any issues he ran into on Origin (where the directory junction appears to be partially successful in that Origin recognizes that it's at least 'downloaded', but not yet 'installed').

No problem, good luck with it!

It seems fairly easy to find tools to get it working for Steam, i suppose with BF3 and other big titles due perhaps more people might make them for Origin soon as well to make it a bit easier.

 

[FragTek]

Yes you can use directory junctions (aka symlinks) successfully in Windows to locate your game content on your hard drive and the actual Steam/Origin apps on your SSD.

I made a thread about it not long ago. It's kicking around here somewhere.