Since I am running steam on an SSD I really only care about a select few games on the drive at a time to have the speed benefits of an SSD. All the others can stay on mechanical drive as far as I am concerned. I came across some articles on Symbolic Links which looks like a pretty cool feature to use for this. Just wondering what the tech people here think about using these? Is it a viable option?
I saw someone a year or so ago bring up the same thing with Steam. I cant remember if the person got it working or not but the idea would be worth a shot.
It seems to work Just have to cut and paste the game where you want it and then create the SymLink where it used to be located in steam. I downloaded Link Shell Extension so I didn't have to use the cmd prompt to do it. It took about 2 minutes to do it A few left/right clicks and all done **Enigma, can you edit the thread title to reflect the new title on the first post?
I wonder if it might be a better idea to install Steam onto the physical hard drive. Then you just use symlink's for the games you want onto the SSD. That way when you install a new game Steam will default the download the the HDD. It would keep you from running out of space on the solid state when downloading something big.
just get more solid states! At or below $1 per gig, these things are getting more affordable. Sometimes, reinventing the wheel actually works!
Wouldn't you get the speed of an HDD all the time in that case? The program would first have to find the files on the HDD at the lower speeds and then be linked to the actual file on the SSD? Thus negating the speed benefits of the SSD? ETA I don't think what I said actually makes sense.
Symbolic links in Winsucks if i recall symbollic linking in NTFS is poorly implamented and limited to 31 symbolic links in a single path i think you would be better of useing NTFS Junction points and not trying to symlink your games
Right now I have these games symlinked: -Arma II + Arrowhead -Blacklight Retribution -Dungeons and Dragons Online -Tribes Haven't had any problems and it is super easy to create the symlinks. It would be just as easy to create junctions as it is just below symlinks in the list when creating the folder on the main steam drive. I haven't had any problems with the games yet and when looking up symlink/junction/hardlink I couldn't really find anything that said symlinks in win7 were bad. The only thing I had to keep in my was hard links cannot span partitions so symlink or junction were my other options. Would you happen to know of an article that gives the down side to symlinks vs. junctions? If there is a problem I would gladly switch the type of redirect I am using.