Steam Soon to Allow Users to Specify Hard Drives for Game Installs

Ever have a friend, that during your big announcement, can’t shut up about their own happenings? Well, Valve is kind of like that friend this week. While Intel, Apple, and other major players are in San Francisco unveiling their latest innovations this week, Valve keeps on giving us reason to talk about it. We’ve already covered Steam’s “Big Picture” mode and the first Greenlight-approved games to hit the service, so what possibly could we be writing about now?

Soon, Steam will allow you to choose which hard drive to install your games to.

That one statement is so important, it deserved its own paragraph. For what seems like forever, many Steam fans have complained about not being able to install some games to their SSD, and the rest to their HDD. While it hasn’t been impossible to pull it off, the process of doing it now is complicated and hardly ideal.

I say “soon”, but the feature is actually available now, if you have the latest beta (the one with Big Picture mode). However, as it is just a beta, I wouldn’t personally recommend confiding in it too much. You could be fine, but it’d be unfortunate if changes to the feature when it hits the next stable version would wipe out your settings.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can add a “-dev” to the executable launcher for the program, which will reveal “CONSOLE” up top. There, you can type in “install_folder_ui” and hit enter to launch the pop-up. As some of my personally-listed games show an install size of 0 bytes, I am willing to bet that this feature is still very much beta, but… finally we’re going to be able to manage our installs easier. One omission I’ve noticed is that there isn’t a way to move a game from one drive to another, so hopefully that’ll come when the feature officially launches.