Moving steam woes

fade

fade

Staff member
I reinstalled windows recently, saving my steam folder to an external HDD, following steam's own instructions. When I restored the folder everything seemed to go correctly. I was able to start and play games. However when I tried to update the games, I got a disk write error from steam. If I ran steam as admin, update worked. Clearly a permissions or ownership problem. Now I'm used to the *nix world where this is solved in 5 seconds with a chmod and or chown, but I could not get this sorted. I changed the owner recursively and I set the attributes recursively, and I set the permissions recursively. Rebooting and restarting steam had no effect. I finally gave up and deleted steam. I redownloaded all my games. Which ironically was faster than saving the steamapps folder to a USB 3.0 drive was due to the many small files (archiving would make the copy fast but the 7z operation estimated itself at 9 hours). Everything works fine now. Not really asking for help so much as chronicling this for anyone who searches. You are not alone.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

GasBandit said:
How I wish you could download steam games to multiple drives. My SSD is only 128 gigs. I've only got 6 games installed (TF2, MWO, Hitman Absolution, Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, Path of Exile) and already the bastard's 3 quarters full.[DOUBLEPOST=1389395213,1389394748][/DOUBLEPOST]And now I wish I'd thought to google that.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/15/joy-install-steam-games-to-other-drives/
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I was going to say, I have steam connected to two different drives. My 250gb ssd and my 1tb hdd. I just tell it which one to install to when I download.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

yeah, I do'nt let Steam put anything on my SSD except the program itself. The games all go on my separate Steam drive. There's not even a Stema folder there, just a bunch of Steam install .dlls and the Steam Library.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Bubble181 said:
yeah, I do'nt let Steam put anything on my SSD except the program itself. The games all go on my separate Steam drive. There's not even a Stema folder there, just a bunch of Steam install .dlls and the Steam Library.
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Not using your SSD as a gaming drive?
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Bubble181 said:
Nope. Don't see why I would. It's 128 GB. There's Windows, Office and Steam on there, and I think that's it.
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128 is the most common size, and that still leaves plenty of room for games. Especially load intensive games that can really benefit from the faster load time of SSDs.

Seriously, put skyrim on there and marvel as you never see a loading screen again.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Ravenpoe said:
128 is the most common size, and that still leaves plenty of room for games. Especially load intensive games that can really benefit from the faster load time of SSDs.

Seriously, put skyrim on there and marvel as you never see a loading screen again.
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I've not been able to read the text on a single loading screen in Skyrim so far. If they're any faster I'll have to screencap them just to get the useful info. And I'm not even kidding. Really, I know I've only played a couple of hours of Skyrim so far, but I don't think I've seen a loading screen over 2 seconds yet. Uhhh...yay new computer? :p
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Bubble181 said:
I've not been able to read the text on a single loading screen in Skyrim so far. If they're any faster I'll have to screencap them just to get the useful info. And I'm not even kidding. Really, I know I've only played a couple of hours of Skyrim so far, but I don't think I've seen a loading screen over 2 seconds yet. Uhhh...yay new computer? :p
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I haven't even -seen- a loading screen to attempt to read it, and my computer is a few years old by this point. My point is ssd load time is super nice, though of course not every game is going to need it.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
For me, the one I definitely wanted on SSD was TF2. That sucker has legendary load times with really no good reason.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
Wow, I played Skyrim on my PS3. The load times were horrendous. I wanted to throw the PS3 out the window.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

Ravenpoe said:
The PS3 port of Skyrim is also notoriously bad. It barely runs on it and is not well optimized for the system at all.
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To be fair to Bethesda, though, from what I understand the PS3 was insanely terrible to program for.

As for the SSD, I'm still waiting until the dollar to GB ratio drops a little more.
 
Frank

Frank

Bowielee said:
To be fair to Bethesda, though, from what I understand the PS3 was insanely terrible to program for.

As for the SSD, I'm still waiting until the dollar to GB ratio drops a little more.
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To be fair to every poor bastard that bought it on PS3, Bethesda released it knowing full well what a train wreck it was.

I'm in the same boat with SSDs. It's funny, when I check my Windows experience index, everything is maxed...except my shitty old hard drives...so my score is only 5.9.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Huh, didn't know it was still around in Win 8.1. Neat. 7.9, limited by CPU and memory. Highest is 8.3 for the graphics and 3D.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

fade said:
The load times were really the only negative thing I noted on the ps3 version.
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I watched my sister play it on PS3. It crashed often, usually during big battles.

Also, the longer you play, the shittier the performance gets.



*edit: This is old footage from before a patch, but even after patch the same problem is still encountered after a certain amount of time spent in-game.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
I mean personal experience, I played the thing a lot, and I don't remember it ever crashing. I didn't get it until this summer, though, so maybe the bugs were mostly patched by then.
 
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