[SOLVED] Upgrading game storage to larger drive of the same make but higher capacity

[Mister Lemons]

Long story short; I've finally used every byte of storage on my dedicated steam drive. It's a Sabrent Rocket 256 M.2 NVME that I've only managed to fill after updating the games I currently have on there. I'm not a hoarder of digital media so it's taken two years to fill that measly 240GB partitioned for the software. That being said, having less than 3GB of storage remaining on that drive is less than optimal considering Halo ODST had to wave goodbye to make way for the update for another game. I got my hands on a Sabrent Rocket 512 M.2 NVME as an upgrade and I'd like to install it tomorrow. The good news is that everything on that drive is exclusively steam content so if I had to reinstall it all, no big deal. That being said, I'd prefer to simply move the content from that drive to the newer higher capacity drive since I could get that done WAY quicker than being at the mercy of my network bottleneck.

Now, my X470 Prime only has the two M.2 NVME slots, one of which is the boot drive and lacks the capacity to piggyback the data. So I got an external USB M.2 housing to enable me to power and access both game drives simultaneously, so the connection is covered. My question is this:

How would I go about transferring all the content of my current games drive, named "Games Drive (D", to the higher capacity model which I would also like to keep the designation?

I suppose the problem I having is that I don't understand enough to know if the process will interfere with directories and such. I'm worried the system or steam will throw a fit over the new hardware not being exactly similar in both physical form and directory. I'll be replacing the current D; with the upgraded drive, preferably also named D; straight onto the motherboard and I don't know if that'll cause issues with the system. They're the same exact brand and model but different capacities, so I would assume it would be as simple as formatting the drive and giving it the same name, hooking up the "old" drive through USB and copying literally everything over. Again, I'm not that tech savvy, so I don't know if that approach would be successful. Would it be simpler to use a program to clone the drive? I figured it'd just be better to ask than to trial-N-error this one.

Thanks for your time.

 

[ThatVietGuy]

Transferring Steam games is very easy - just drag and drop the games in the Steam --> steamapps --> common folder to the new drive.

Then, you have to direct Steam to the new folder under Steam --> Settings --> Downloads --> Steam Library Folders

 

[TerryLaze]

Just copy everything over, since you will replace the old drive with the new you don't even need to do anything with steam, if you give the new drive the same letter as the old one had all games will show up immediately.

 

[Mister Lemons]

Transferring Steam games is very easy - just drag and drop the games in the Steam --> steamapps --> common folder to the new drive.

Then, you have to direct Steam to the new folder under Steam --> Settings --> Downloads --> Steam Library Folders

Just copy everything over, since you will replace the old drive with the new you don't even need to do anything with steam, if you give the new drive the same letter as the old one had all games will show up immediately.

Thank you both, did the transfer today and it went through without a hitch. Glorious NVME transfer averaged 145mb/s on USB 3.0and I didn't even have to mess with directories since it was designated with the original name "Games Drive (D" on format.


FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD:

Should anyone else stumble upon this thread sharing my previous concerns, I replaced the game drive on the board with the new higher capacity drive, booted up and went over to the drive manager (Win 10), right clicked the unmapped new drive and "initialized" it. After a restart of the computer, it showed the proper drive space available (because the old capacity was showing earlier), and was ready to format. After formatting and naming with designation "D" (same as the previous drive), I hooked up the OLD drive from a USB external M.2 adapter (now showing up as "Games Drive (E" with my new storage retaining the directory "Games Drive (D") and simply copied the contents from the old drive to the new storage. The whole thing was ready to go immediately without altercation after the transfer was complete.