How do I move just a single Steam game to another hard drive?

[Axehacker32]

I have Steam installed on a 1TB HDD, along with around 400 gigs of games. I only want to move the one I play most (Warframe) to my SSD that I use as a boot/software drive, while still keeping Steam and all the other games on my HDD. What's the best way to go about doing this?

Also, do I need to worry about proper 4k alignment stuff for transferring data from HDDs to SSDs? I've been hearing about that but I'm not sure it's something I really need to worry about.

 

[USAFRet]

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2965732

1. in Windows: copy game folder to your steam games folder on other drive
2. in Steam: uninstall the game (right click on game and choose: delete local content)
3. in Steam: install into other drive (where you've already copied the files)
Steam will just verify that all files are present and change its settings, registry setting and any other settings that point to game location.
4. Done. No download necessary, no manual changing of settings.

 

[USAFRet]

Also, the Steam client gives the ability for multiple install locations. Different folders, different drives, wherever...

 

[Axehacker32]

Thanks! I had a small issue with steam not wanting to write to a folder on my C: but that was fixed by making a folder that wasn't in the x86 program files. All good now I think, just need to do the actual switching of game location.

 

[spafbi]

I, too, have both HDDs and SSDs. I occasionally will manage game installations, placing more frequently played games on the faster storage and moving less-played games to the slower storage - and providing your filesystems are NTFS, my method may work well for you. To move the games to a different drive faster than uninstalling and reinstalling the games, I use Explorer to cut/paste (move) the game's installation folder to the desired location. I then open an administrative command prompt and create an NTFS directory junction to the game's new location. Steam, Origin, and your games are none the wiser they are actually living on a new drive. Here are the three steps I take:

1) Use Explorer to cut the game's installation folder and then paste the folder into the new drive/location.
2) Open an Adminstrative command prompt (from the Start menu or Start screen, search for cmd.exe, right-mouse-click on cmd.exe and select "Run as administrator").
3) Making the appropriate substitutions, execute the following command:

mklink /j C:\Games\OldGameLocation D:\Games\NewGameLocation

That's it!