I recently got a new computer. It has a 256 gig SSD with the OS installed on it and a 2 TB data drive. I ended up installing steam on the SSD along with Crysis and Half LIfe 2, EP 1 and 2, and Black Mesa. However, the SSD is filling up fast and there are many other games I wish to install as well. Therefore, I would like to have all of my games on the HDD and keep the SSD purely for other various programs. Can I copy and paste the Steam install folder to my HDD, or is that a bad idea? If I need to uninstall and start over I can just do that too. Also, will my games load much much slower on the HDD? Right now crysis loads levels in like 8 seconds which blows my mind. Will I see a massive increase in loading times because if that's the case I might just keep it the way it is... Anyway, thanks a bunch!

NTFS Junction links are the best bet. There's actually a 3rd party tool called http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover designed just for this purpose, of course breaking out the command prompt and manually creating junction links gives you more geek cred

Ok, I'll look into that. What do you think? Should I just keep the games on the SSD? Would the loading times be much much worse on the HDD?

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

Loading times will be worse, but how much worse depends on the game and your SSD and HDD. It's not going to be much worse if your HDD is fast. If it's a 5400rpm energy saver drive, it might be. You can always try, and if it doesn't work out for you switch back.

A lot of game files, like textures, are large and rely on the drive's sequential read speed. HDDs do this fine, if slower than SSDs. Where they suffer and SSDs really take off is on small random files with seek time in between (because SSDs have no moving parts and near-instantaneous seek time).

Ok, I'll look into it and figure what I'll do! Thanks guys

I followed the directions on the Steam site. It worked great! Loading times on Crysis only went up about 4-5 seconds. I have just one more question: This will have no effect on my actual game performance correct?

Just noticed something else: On my SSD the hiberfil.sys is taking up 9.4 GB and my Pagefil.sys is 12.5 GB. Why are these files so large and can I make them smaller?

My system ram is 12 gigs so I can't see needing so much being used.

Leave your pagefile alone, maybe lower it so that it doesn't take so much space. If you delete it completely you risk breaking compatibility with some programs.

You'll also need to leave your hibernation file alone if you use hibernation mode.

The reason both of these files are so large is precisely because you have 12gig of ram.

I definitely don't use hibernation mode so could I just disable it and that file will go away?

Yep, exactly.

I'd lower the page file on the SSD to the minimum recommended for the System partition: 512 megabytes for system dumps. The rest of the pagefile can be moved to the second drive.

While yes the hibernation file should be kept if hibernation is used, to reduce wear leveling on the SSD, it's best to remove it from the SSD drive to the second drive

I disabled hibernation mode. If I just set my page file to 2 gigs would that be sufficient? I never run more than 1 game at a time, or a few programs like windows media player and chrome.

Put 512 MB on your C:\ drive and then put 4096 MB on your regular hard drive. That'll give you the best options, as it reduces impact on your SSD (while maintaining the necessary space for system dumps) while still leaving plenty for the benefits of paging (even if you have plenty of RAM, there are still benefits related to cached files that make keeping it around worth while).