It’s not hard to run out of storage space given the sheer size of today’s games, with tens of gigabytes piling up after installing a few big games. Or you’ve just installed a new additional storage drive to increase capacity and want to reorganize everything by moving your games to the second drive.

If this is your case, you should know that Steam allows you to move the games you have installed to a different partition or drive, internal or external, than the one you use by default and without having to reinstall them from scratch. We’ll walk through the process in this basic tutorial.

How to move steam games

Moving the Valve platform games you have installed is very simple and can be done directly from the Steam client. As follows:

• Run the application.
• Go to the Steam menu in the upper left corner of the screen and tap “Settings”.

• Select the ‘Downloads’ section and click on ‘Steam Library Folders’ in the right pane.

• Navigate to the partition or drive where the games you want to move are located and you’ll see the ones you’ve installed.
• Check the box next to the games you want to move and click the Move button.

Depending on the size of the games you are moving, the process will take some time. Be patient until it’s finished, and of course make sure of it target drive has enough space to suit all you want to move.

If you’ve installed a new storage drive, such as an SSD, or want to use an external drive and don’t see it in the Steam Storage Manager, click the plus (+) icon, select the drive you want to move the games to, and create a SteamLibrary folder where the games will be stored.

For example, we added an external drive in E: “GamesSteam”:

Using external drives

Using external storage allows you to add additional options when managing Steam games, such as transferring them to a different computer than the one we’re using. You should know that too can be played from there without having to transfer them to internal drives. For this type of use, try to make the chosen solution as fast as possible and especially to be connected to a high-performance port, Thunderbolt or USB 3.2. For these cases, you can use the hard drives that you have replaced in your PC, convert them to external drives and use them to store the huge space that today’s big games require.