Short answer, yes!
You can easily transfer Steam games to another hard drive, without having to redownload all the games again, using two methods.
The first is through the Steam client interface and the other is using a folder copy method.
Both methods are very easy, but the first method is only limited to one game at a time, whereas the second method, allows you to move multiple Steam Games to another hard drive.
Before we get into how to do it, let’s quickly look at the reasons why we should move our Steam games to another drive
Why move your Steam Games to another Drive
For those who haven’t and are unsure why you’d want to do this, here are 3 reasons why should move your Steam games to another or new hard drive
Fast Game Load Times
If you want your Steam games to launch faster, putting your them onto a faster SSD or NVMe drive, is by far the best way for that to happen, especially if you have a very old hard drive.
Running Low on Drive Space
While fast, your current SSD, such as the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD ($108.50), might be running low on space if you are like me and your Steam library is getting very large from all the great sales happening.
In this case, moving most of your Steam Games to a larger 6-8TB hard drive, such as Western Digital Black 6TB Performance Hard Drive ($256.50) or Seagate IronWolf 8TB Performance Hard Drive ($149.99), are the perfect solutions.
I do this without any speed issues, thanks to the very fast 7200RPM and large 256MB cache of these drives, that are able to do reach sequential read/write speeds of around 250-300MB, which is not far off from SSD drives speed of 500MB.
I do however keep my regular played, or heavy loading games on my Samsung 970 EVO 1TB NVMe drive ($157.99), for optimal performance.
Don’t install games on Windows Boot Drive
If you have Steam installed in the default ‘C:\Program Files\Steam’ folder, on your Windows 10 boot drive, I would highly recommend moving your games to another hard drive as soon as possible.
The reason being that if Windows corrupts, or is infected with a virus, you may need to format, without being able to boot up and make a backup, which means you lose all your game install files.
Keeping your Windows boot drive as clean as possible, meaning as less installs as possible, also helps to keep it healthy and fast. The less you install directly on to it the better. Splitting installs and data across another drive, allows both drives to run at full speed at the same time, thus increasing bandwidth and performance
Keeping your games on a separate hard drive, means you can just plug it into another computer and be up and running again, without having to redownload everything.
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Setup a second Steam Library Folder
In order for either of these two methods to work, we first need to create another Steam Library Folder on the new hard drive or SSD. To do this, first open up your Steam client and do the following:
- Click on the ‘STEAM’ button at the top of your client, then click ‘SETTINGS’.
- In the settings popup menu, click on ‘DOWNLOADS’
- In Downloads, click on the ‘STEAM LIBRARY FOLDERS’ button
- Another popup window will appear, listing your current default Steam Games Library install folder, which will most likely be ‘C:\Program Files\Steam’
- Click the ‘ADD LIBRARY FOLDER’ button, on the bottom left
Now select the new hard drive, where you’d like to move and install your Steam games to. By default Steam will create a new folder called ‘SteamLibrary’, but you can rename this to whatever you like, such as ‘Steam’ or ‘Games’, or \Games\Steam, if you are like me and have various other clients install under your games folder.
Make sure to click the ‘SELECT’ button.
Once done, you should see the new drive location added in below your previous install location. Now simply right click on the new Steam games library drive location, and set it to ‘DEFAULT’.
This way, all future Steam game downloads will be installed here. You can also select your previous location should you wish to, during the installation of any game.
Great, our new hard drive or SSD is set as our default Steam games folder, but now you might still be wondering how to copy Steam games to a new SSD or hard drive
Let’s start with the in-client method first, then move onto the multiple folder copy method.
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Method A : Move Steam Games using the Client
Moving Steam Games to another drive is just as easy as setting up the folder. Go back into your main Steam Client and do the following:
- ‘RIGHT CLICK’ the Steam game that you want to move to the new harddrive, then click ‘PROPERTIES’
- Then click the ‘LOCAL FILES’ tab
- Here you want to click the ‘MOVE INSTALL FOLDER’ button.
- A popup window will appear with a drop down list of the new library location, that we just set up, select it.
As we only have two locations, and the game is currently using one of them, the drop-down will only show the other by default, so all you have to do now is to click the ‘MOVE FOLDER’ button.
If you had set up a third or more install locations in the previous steps, then those will also show in the drop down menu.
Now sit back and wait for Steam to move the game to the new install drive. The time it takes is dependent on the speed of both drives, as well as your CPU in general. Usually it doesn’t take too long.
I was able to move DOOM which is a 70GB game to a new SSD drive in about 5mins.
You might see the game be added to your update queue, but don’t worry, Steam will take a few seconds just to initialize the game.
And that’s about all you need to know on how to copy downloaded Steam games to another drive.
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Method B : How to move Multiple Steam Games to another drive
So while the above method is perfect for moving one Steam game to another drive at a time, its very time consuming if you have a large library of games that you need to move to a new hard drive.
Fortunately there is a way to do this, which is very easy as its similar to the method of how to move Steam games to another computer
First you will need to open both your current and new Steam Library folders.
Now make a copy of the game folders found in ‘\Steam\steamapps\common‘ and copy the game folders that you want to move over to the new hard drive. But make sure to create a ‘\common’ folder in the new Steam Library Folder, if there isn’t one there already.
- Copy the game folders into the ‘\steamapps\common’ folder on the new drive.
- Once done go back into Steam and either ‘SHIFT+LEFT CLICK’ or ‘CTRL+LEFT CLICK’, to highlight the multiple games that you just copied over.
- Once selected, ‘RIGHT-CLICK’ to bring up a pop-up menu, where you can then click ‘UNINSTALL’.
- Don’t worry, this will only delete the game from the original install Steam Library folder and not the new location.
- Once uninstalled, again ‘SHIFT+LEFT CLICK’ or ‘CTRL+LEFT CLICK’, to highlight the multiple games that you just uninstalled, ‘RIGHT-CLICK’ again to bring up a pop-up menu, where you can then click ‘INSTALL’.
This will save you a lot of time, compared to moving each Steam game individually.
In the popup menu, click the drop down and select the new Steam Library Folder, where you just copied the game folders to.
Now Steam will do its magic, as it searches for the already existing game files in the new drive’s ‘\steamapps\common’ folder. Once it finds them, it will simply initiate the install without redownloading the entire game.
Note that the game folders must be in the correct ‘\steamapps\common’ folder, otherwise Steam won’t see it and it will start to download it from scratch.
Make sure to also check out how to backup Steam Games, which is a must do for large Steam libraries or for those of you with capped internet accounts, in case something happens to your original game hard drive, such as it getting stolen, broken or damaged by fire or water.
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