I have a 60GB SSD and a 2TB HDD and the SSD is used for one game, Total War: Warhammer(TWW), which takes up 34GB. To clarify, the SSD have ~55GB of usable space and the only thing on it is TWW á 34GB. This gives me ~22GB of free space on the SSD. Steam is installed on the HDD and I'm on Windows 7 64-bit system. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this but how TWW's patching work is that it needs to allocate the entire space of the game so that it can open each file and rewrite the code.
The issue is that each time TWW needs to patch itself it tries to allocate additional 34GB which I don't have on the SSD. Steam tells me "there is not enough free disk space".
Instead, I've solved the issue by manually moving the game to the HDD and then back again to the SSD every time a patch is up, so it downloads the patch on the HDD then I move the game back to the SSD.
I would like to find an automatic patching of the game so I don't have to manually move the game between drives/discs every time there is a new patch. Ideally, the game would stay on the SSD and the download and patching would happen from the HDD so that it allocates the space on the HDD instead.
Can it be solved by removing the association to the library on the SSD for Steam and create a link that leads to the game folder on the SSD? I'd think that this way, Steam would download the patch on the HDD and then update the files on the SSD thinking that Steam would still be working on the HDD. Is this the best way to do it or does it involve future problems with patching TWW?
My question touches the concept of the answer to this question, "How can I move Steam games to another disk?", asked in 2010. In my case, I wouldn't use Steam Mover since I would only need the "mklink"-command but as described in the previous paragraph is this a bad idea and should I stay with my current solution?
Best Answer
Unfortunately as it stands, this is currently not possible. I ran into the same issue with Hollow Knight last week, when an update was sent out. The update itself was only 1GB, but Steam automatically allocated an additional 9GB for the update. The only method seems to be to either clear out disk space before you install the patch or just stick the game on your HDD entirely and play it from there.