Hot swap Steam library?

[George Coldham]

I recently got a second hand 5.25" hot swap bay for 2.5" drives. I'm in the process of building a second gaming rig for when I go between home and uni and was wondering if I can install Steam games on hot swap drives? This would save having to buy two lots of SSD's every time I run out of memory and would mean I don't have to start games such as Skyrim all over again.

Would this affect Steam in any way when moving between PC's?

 

[legend001523]

As long as you install the steam folder onto the hot swap it should be fine

 

[George Coldham]

So would I just install Steam on to the OS drive and then have my library on the SSD('s) using the SSD('s) as game cartridges in effect?

 

[legend001523]

I just meant the entire steam folder in general

 

[doubletake]

No, you don't install Steam onto a removable drive. You can choose where to install a game when you first go to download/install it. After that, when swapping the drives, you just go to Steam settings > Downloads > Content Libraries > Steam Library Folders, then from there you select what drives/folders to scan for Steam game installs.

-Edit-

The issue of keeping savegame files is entirely game-dependent. Some games play nice and keep the save games in their Steam install folder, others keep them in one of the many random locations in the Steam\userdata folder, and others will save them somewhere in your My Games folder in the user Documents. It'll still be up to you to figure out where your save games are if you don't use the Steam Cloud sync option.

 

[George Coldham]

Thanks both of you, I moved Skyrim over to the SSD in the hot swap bay and it works fine. If I remove it mid game play Steam crashes but did I expect any different? Also Steam doesn't register Skyrim as not being on the system without reloading the client. All minor issues if i can more easily and cheaply have games all over.