Hard Drive Management

T

TommyBarnez

Active member
Hi all,

I hope you're well?

I picked up a new gaming rig a few months back and I'm coming up against a bit of an issue I cant seem to work out.

I have two hard drives - an SSD at I believe 256gig and a Sata 2tb.

I play games and record gameplay editing videos and use the SSD for the game I'm playing and the SATA has the captures and edited videos.

My issue is that the SSD has filled very quickly with currently only 8gig remaining. Upon looking closer at what was going on it seems that GTA 5 is causing my problems as it seems to be on my hard drive twice - once in my steam folder and again in a seperate Rockstar folder. All in it is taking up about 170gig and I just cant work it out.

Fairly new to PC gaming and using steam so not sure if I have done something wrong however I don't have duplicates of the other games. Is this something random with Rockstar? And if so what can I do to solve the problem? I went to move the Rockstar folder over to the SATA however thought I'd check here first as feel I should be able to delete it?

Thanks for help

Tom

p.s Gaming rig was from PC Specialist :D
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I don't game so what I'm about to say might be total nonsense. :)

When you have two physical drives, by default Windows locates the user folders (Documents, Video, Pictures, Downloads, etc.) on the same physical drive as the Windows operating system, in your case that means the SSD. This means that any file or folder that should be written to the Documents folder, or Pictures folder, etc. will go (by default) onto the SSD. This will fill the SSD quite quickly.

What you may need to do (if you have't done so already) is to move the Documents, Pictures, Videos, Downloads, etc. folders onto your HDD. You can't simply copy them across because Windows needs to know that the default location for these folders has changed, so you need to use a Windows procedure to do this.

Here's how to do it....

1. On your HDD create a new folder called Users, under this folder create new folders called Contacts, Documents, Pictures, Videos, Downloads, Music, Saved Games, Searches. These folders are where we will move the existing folder contents to.

2. Open File Explorer and expand the Users folder on your C: drive, in there are your Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc. folders.

3. Repeat the following for each of the following folders (Contacts, Documents, Pictures, Videos, Downloads, Music, Saved Games, Searches). I will use Contacts as an example...

a. Right-click on the Contacts folder and select Properties.

b. Click the Location tab.

c. Click the Move button.

d. Navigate to the Users\Contacts folder on your HDD and click Ok to select this folder.

e. Click the Ok button, you will get a 'do you want to do this' confirmation message, click Yes. The contents of the Contacts folder on your SSD will now be moved to the Contacts folder on your HDD and Windows will remember the new default Contacts location. All new contacts will go into this folder on your HDD by default.

f. Repeat the above steps for all the other folders.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
+1 to the above suggestion.

Many games will keep their saves in your Documents folder (sometimes specifically in Documents\My Games) - they hardly ever use the Saved Games folder, though a few do. Game saves can take up a lot of space.

Despite that I tend to keep the Documents folder on the SSD, any just manually move any older game saves I want to keep to my HDD.
 
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