Can anyone tell me exactly how much hard disk space a Steam Machine needs?

[SonOfUHF]

Web site says 500GB, OS download says 250GB. And all of that is way way way more than Windows.

I'm building a PC that would be reasonably powerful but also have no moving parts, and I'm contemplating whether SteamOS would be an option. It has an M2 240B SSD which is plenty for a gaming PC, but not SteamOS.

[Balderick]

Big Picture just got updated to allow management of steam libraries which means partitions and drives. This now means you could install steamos to a 20 GB drive and assign /home partition for SteamLibrary to any other drive or pertition that is available.


There is nothing in steam client that is steamos specific. SteamOS is just a means to boot, load and run the steam for linux client.
To keep informed of updates to steam client you could join and follow the Steam Beta Client group. https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta#announcements/detail/48771702973186533

A clean install of steamos uses less than 10GB of drive space. The 1TB recommewndation is due to Valve wanting people to test the image mehod of install. The original official .zip installer supported UEFI machines only just as the image does.

[Air]

The OS itself only takes up a few gigabytes. Those higher requirements are more taking the space taken up by games into consideration.

[TransistorCowboy]

I use a 240 SSD. SteamOS installed no problems (all defaults) with approx 192G remaining for game files.

[TransistorCowboy]

Originally posted by Balderick:

Big Picture just got updated to allow management of steam libraries which means partitions and drives. This now means you could install steamos to a 20 GB drive and assign /home partition for SteamLibrary to any other drive or pertition that is available.

Very interesting, I haven't seen this yet but very glad it came.

[Shark]

My home build Steam Machine has a 120gb ssd. This can be problematic, because some games are rather large, but it general it works.

[Balderick]

@TransistorCowboy If you run the installer in expert mode you could reduce size of /, /boot/recovery partitions to make more space available for games in /home.

Regardless of partitioning the actual used space does not change on a clean install. The used space is way less than the 40+ GB disk space you describe on your default automated steamos install partitioning scheme.

[SonOfUHF]

Thanks everyone... This is all what I thought. Now do I do it... ? Hmm....

[TransistorCowboy]

Originally posted by Balderick:

Regardless of partitioning the actual used space does not change on a clean install. The used space is way less than the 40+ GB disk space you describe on your default automated steamos install partitioning scheme.

Very true - although the default does assign 9.5G for swap, 9.3G for /, 9.3G for recovery, 400M for efi ...and none of those partitions are even close to full.

I was just saying after the default partitioning, the remaining /home partition on a 240GB drive was about 192GB

I'm adding a 1TB HDD for those games that I don't run as often or that I don't mind loading a bit slower.

[SonOfUHF]

Swap space? How hard is all that to turn off? I usually put in plenty of RAM to avoid swap.

[TransistorCowboy]

Originally posted by MachineGunBallet:

Swap space? How hard is all that to turn off? I usually put in plenty of RAM to avoid swap.

easy peasy just remove it from the /etc/fstab

and if you do the advanced install you have more options. I do like to have swap just in case but I don't like swap on an SSD - even though the system hasn't even touched it. A swap file may be better though. Or I just put a swap on the HDD with pri=2 and the default created swap on the SDD to pri=1.

[JOLYON PALMER]

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[ProfessorKaos64]

Originally posted by Balderick:

Big Picture just got updated to allow management of steam libraries which means partitions and drives. This now means you could install steamos to a 20 GB drive and assign /home partition for SteamLibrary to any other drive or pertition that is available.

What? BPM/SteamOS only allows you to delete or skip to the game in question for "Disk Management." This has been there for quite some time.

[directhex]

~31 GB, assuming a default install.

500MB EFI System Partition, where required
10GB / (OS)
10GB /boot/recovery (OS recovery)
10GB swap (needed for OS recovery)
All remaining space /home (Steam client & games)

[Shark]

Originally posted by directhex:

~31 GB, assuming a default install.

500MB EFI System Partition, where required
10GB / (OS)
10GB /boot/recovery (OS recovery)
10GB swap (needed for OS recovery)
All remaining space /home (Steam client & games)

It is possible to install with less, but then no recovery partition will be created. Dunno what partitions it does make then, though.

[Balderick]

the recovery image is about 4GB iirc that means you could possibly use a 5GB partion for /boot/recovery clonzilla live image
i do not have steamos currently installed to confirm the actual used space in each of tha partitions to help confirm minimum partition sizes
I do mknow manualy creating the /boot/recovery partition in the same sda# as default install allows post_install.sh to run clonzilla as expected. The scrpt looks for sda# and mount point and not available space iirc.