I have a small SSD as my main drive and a secondary drive thats 2TB. My question is can I put steam on that secondary drive or does it need to go on my main drive? I apologize if this has been covered but Im new to steam, tried to install it and seems just want to go on my main drive. Thought asking here wouldnt offend the internet police. Thanks for any help in this regard.

Games installed via steam have to go in the steam folder. You have no choice about that. So just make sure you have enough room where ever you install steam.

It needs to be put on the drive with your operating system. Well, you can put it on the second hard drive but I heard it can cause some problems if you reformat / re-install games and such because of the registry.

You can install it wherever you like. Hell, you could install it to an external drive.

that aside, you will have performance issues depending on how that drive is connected to your system. so an external drive on USB would suffer major performance issues.

Installing steam to your SSD, which has substantially higher throughput then a conventional platter drive would be 'ideal'. depending on the size of your ssd, that might not be practical.

but why you would buy an SSD just for your OS on a gaming PC is beyond me. so windows can boot faster? i reboot maybe once every 3 months.

You should be able to install it to whatever drive you want. However, even if you install it to say C:\, exit Steam entirely, then you can just copy the contents of the Steam folder over to the other drive. Once you've done that, delete all the files (but not the folders) in the main directory except the Steam executable. When you start Steam next, it will automatically replace the files you deleted with ones that work for where Steam is now at.

Yep, I keep Steam installed on its own drive, a 10,000RPM velociraptor (and for other games not from Steam). It will work fine.

This is wrong.

true but you can create folder on ssd called steam and use steam mover to shift files across. I use all the time and it is brilliant.

http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover

my SSd is windows and games I use.

My 1tb is games storage and docs and steam install. Just install game as normal then use this to transfer to SSd for big FPS increase.

Actually you have that backwards...especially if you are using Win Vista or 7. Installing Steam (and by default your games) to your system drive (default path) you will have UAC permission problems (unless you have UAC disabled. It is ALWAYS better to install Steam to a secondary HDD, or i the case of only having a single drive, place it in the root of your system drive and NOT in the "Program Files" folder.

What I did in a similar situation was install Steam on the SSD and kept a few games on it, but copied the entire SSD to my second drive and had the majority of my games there in the second Steam folder. If you did that you just have to run 2 separate Steam.exes for whichever drive you want to play off of.

I know, it's just easier for those less computer savvy to simply say "games must be in steam folder".

Ya I didint think about your point up there, I am currently saving for a larger SSD to put there. It was a bonehead move. My thinking is I really only play one or two games at a time so thought that be only games on that drive. Never Considered sites like steam where you would have entire libraries. Its not undoable, I have my other games on it, my other drive is not USB but installed on computer. My other games work fine on it, like DC online, Rifts.

Guess can just install games playing on steam at the time and load and uninstall as I change games and just save my game folders.

A good tip for you SSD chaps on a fresh install would of been to follow this wonderful http://www.overclock.net/ssd/664738-how-setup-ssd-boot-drive-secondary.html.

Link is currently down so here is an http://play-connect.com/Thread-How-to-Setup-SSD-boot-drive-with-secondary-Hard-disc-optimization

Now your Windows 7 user folder is set up to a secondary HDD instead of using up valuable SSD space. What to do with all this left over space? Why install Steam like a sensible person to your HDD then use http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover to direct your Skyrim install to your SSD.

However if you don't fancy using Steam Mover you can use the slightly more complicated way of http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html. Now we have our valuable SSD with Skyrim running off Steam with plenty of room for mods.

-Just for info I could only afford a 60GB SSD for my build so this works perfectly on keeping my space to a maximum.

It will go to which ever permanent drives you have, just edit the drive letter during installation. It won't allow you to install on removable media like Flash, but a USB HD will suffice.

I use http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html to do the same thing as the Steam mover. Steam is on my HDD with installed games, except the ones I am currently playing. They are on my SSD with a junction point pointing to them from the HDD. It simply involves copy/paste plus drag & drop. (I copy the original files to my SSD then simply rename the game folder on the HDD before dropping the junction. DON'T DELETE THEM. Then a re-download is in order.)

I see no need to run Steam on my SSD, just the actual game files.

Much the same here, and it seems to work well.

Though I took the rather tortuous route of initially installing it on the C drive and then moving it to the games drive later, which involved much faffing with the registry. It works fine, but I don't recommend it (I especially don't recommend it with an Oblivion installation if you're using OBMM, because if you get something wrong, the latter will quietly delete everything it manages.)


Edit: just read the posts about this Steam Mover thing, which sounds like a much better idea!