can steam and games be on seperate drives

[The man, the myth, the leg]

i am planning to build a PC and wonder if i could have steam itself on the much faster SSD and have games on a HDD

[Delta Bravo]

Yes, you can.

Installing Steam Games on Separate Drives

[Omega]

Yes.

Click Steam (top left of the Steam client) > Settings > Downloads > Steam Library Folders.
- Add a Steam game library folder on the 2nd drive here.

When downloading a game you can select the location you wish to install it to.

[The man, the myth, the leg]

ok thanks

[ReBoot]

Doesn't make sense though. Steam's startup is limited by network I/O and the SSD won't help jack against that. If anything, putting the games on the SSD makes sense as those are actually sensitive to mass storage performance.

On the other hand, by separating those two, you're opening the door to the issue mentioned several times on the forum of Steam "forgetting" games. Don't get me wrong, if nothing goes wrong, the issue won't show up. But should stuff happen, like you resetting your system including Steam or your system crashing while Steam is running, you're maybe gonna join wthe "Steam forgot my games"-crowd. By keeping the games in the Steam folder, you're bypassing all of this entirely.

The setup that I recommend is to keep Steam & most games on the HDD and move a few loading-times-critical games onto the SSD.

[The man, the myth, the leg]

thanks for informing me

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Steam Client and the steam games can be pretty much anywhere you want. Same for the other game clients, but with Steam, it never requires an install, simply running the steam.exe will tell WinOS where it is now located. You will need to configure how it sees games, via settings, Steam library folder