Can symbolic links across different disks yeild a speed increase if one is an SSD and one is an HDD?

[t33to]

Hey LTT,

 

I acquired a 120gb SSD. It's not big enough to move my entire steamApps directory over from my 2TB HDD and mostly I just wanted to speed up the loading of GTAV. I did some research and it doesn't appear as though you can tell Steam to put one specific game in one specific location, it seems they all have to be in the SteamApps directory. So I got to thinking, in Linux you can do file linking, surely there is something similar in Windows. Turns out there is. I followed a guide on how to set it up and viola. I have my GTAV game files on the SSD, and it is hardlinked to the Steamapps/common/Grand Theft Auto V directory. Game boots and runs fine, but I'm not sure if I'm actually decreasing the load times. It seems like it's loading faster, but I'd like to be sure. It got me thinking again, perhaps the hardlink can only be as fast as the slowest disk?

 

Anyone here that knows more about this than I do wanna chime in?

[Silencer]

Not an answer but you could make a new steam library thingy on the ssd and move GTA v over there

[t33to]

3 minutes ago, Silencer said:

Not an answer but you could make a new steam library thingy on the ssd and move GTA v over there

I don't believe that's possible without moving all of the other games over as well. The SSD is not big enough to hold all of it.

[Silencer]

4 minutes ago, t33to said:

I don't believe that's possible without moving all of the other games over as well. The SSD is not big enough to hold all of it.

It's possible, you can have two separate libraries for steam games and then just tell steam to check both in the settings

[t33to]

6 minutes ago, Silencer said:

It's possible, you can have two separate libraries for steam games and then just tell steam to check both in the settings

Oh, well that's much easier than what I'm trying to do lol. Where would I adjust the installation path for GTAV? When I rightclick -> properties, under local files I got "Browse Local files", backup game files, delete local game content and verify game cache. I'm assuming the option you speak of is somewhere else?

 

Edit: I think I've found it. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

[Silencer]

15 minutes ago, t33to said:

Oh, well that's much easier than what I'm trying to do lol. Where would I adjust the installation path for GTAV? When I rightclick -> properties, under local files I got "Browse Local files", backup game files, delete local game content and verify game cache. I'm assuming the option you speak of is somewhere else?

 

Edit: I think I've found it. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

^ ???

Except once you've made the folder you can literally just move GTA v into the new common folder