Poll of the Day > How do you all manage storage space for large games?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I use an HP Omen laptop for pc gaming. I have a few large games I keep installed that I play frequently (like Destiny 2.) But how do you guys who actively play several games with massive storage requirements maintain enough storage for all of them? I'm trying to keep enough available storage (I have about 110GB left) for other things, but one game I want to play, for example, has a 90 GB download. Since I'm using like 70% of my 376 GB, I want to know how you handle playing many games (especially large downloads that take a while to download, making "uninstall and reinstall when you're in the mood" pretty slow and inefficient.)

Buy physical games or an external drive. Big external drives are cheap now, and have tons of space. Like an 8TB is under $200.

I try to only have games I'm actively playing installed. If I played multiple large games long-term and it was causing storage issues, I'd get a bigger hard drive.

Just buy more SSDs

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/4/484dfab9.png

Long term games may get backed up to the NAS with spinning disks, but becoming less and less required due to Steam. I do keep copies of my favourite Gog games and it's been a habit to buy first from Gog where possible.

On my PC, currently played games will get tiered onto my primary M2 and older or less frequently played games will get moved onto SSD.

For a laptop for sure you'll need an external drive or upgrade your current drive. I'd prefer the latter.

I try to get large games on console, and use the laptop for smaller games

I uninstall games I don't intend to play again, though I still have more than a few installed.

I definitely have to echo what others have already said and recommend the external drive; a SSD specifically, if you can afford it.

I'm going to state the obvious here, but a laptop isn't a pc. It's not meant to replace a pc it's meant to be portable so it's really not the best choice for everything basically any modern pc is going to have a 1tb hd which makes the answer to just to uninstall games to make space for a new one if you're unable to add new hard drives (it's really easy to do as long as you've got space)

4TB SSD for "Active" games
4TB External HDD for Completed games

And probably about a thousand or so games that aren't installed yet from my library.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/b/bf1161db.png

if you have storage constraints, you either manage them better by deleting things you don't use anymore, or you upgrade the storage

when i play games, the only games downloaded are the ones i'm playing. when i'm done, they are deleted. the idea of "i might wanna play this again so i'll leave it" needs to be ignored because realistically i am unlikely to return to it actually.

TomNook posted...

Buy physical games or an external drive.

I have a 1TB internal system drive, a 1 TB internal 'game' drive, and a 2 TB external media storage drive.

Delete stuff

I never really have a problem with a 128 GB SSD, 500 GB HDD, and 1 TB HDD, but then I don't have many particularly large games and I make a habit of uninstalling stuff when I can safely say there's no chance of me wanting to boot it up impulsively any time soon. If your whole drive is only 376 GB, you might want to consider upgrading it, which is a pain in most modern laptops (I miss the days of just having a panel on the bottom you could remove), but nonetheless doable. You can get a 2-3 TB laptop HDD for $75-100, which wouldn't erase your storage concerns, but would leave you quite a bit more breathing room. If you want the speed of an SSD (I'm guessing that's what you've got now if you've got so little space), they're still more expensive than HDDs, but you can still get 2 TB for ~$150 depending on what formats you can use, so you can look into that as well.

TomNook posted...

Buy physical games or an external drive. Big external drives are cheap now, and have tons of space. Like an 8TB is under $200.

This, I got a 5TB one...or just redownload them since I have a speedy DSL...But I know how you feel, since I'm still on my old Spectre with only 500GB, so I constantly have to delete/redownload games.

Do external drives work with gaming laptops? I know desktops are "better" but a laptop fits my needs better and uses less space, as well as being a general use thing for me.
(not to mention that I'm not exactly a tech wizard.)

Buddyblade posted...

Do external drives work with gaming laptops? I know desktops are "better" but a laptop fits my needs better and uses less space, as well as being a general use thing for me.
(not to mention that I'm not exactly a tech wizard.)

External drives work, but it's limited by the usb port I know it used to be fairly limiting but I'm not sure how modern usb ports compare with sata now days.

BlackScythe0 posted...

External drives work, but it's limited by the usb port I know it used to be fairly limiting but I'm not sure how modern usb ports compare with sata now days.

Most SSDs don't use SATA anymore. SATA 3, the last version developed, has a maximum speed of 6 Gbps. Most SSDs are NVMe now, which attaches directly to the PCI-e bus. The current version PCI-e 6.0 allows up to 60 Gbps per lane; M.2 drives can use up to 4 lanes for a maximum of 240 Gbps. PCI-e 5.0 can do half that, and PCI-e 4.0 half of that.

In comparison, USB4 Gen 4, the current highest version of USB, can do up to 80 Gbps symmetric, or 120/40 Gbps asymmetric. The top end USB 3 port, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, can only do 20 Gbps.

One of my Samsung 990 PRO SSDs has a read speed of just under 60 Gbps, and it's one of the fastest available commercial M.2 drives. The low end Samsung 960 EVO drive has a read speed of 25 Gbps. The Samsung T9, their fastest portable SSD, has a read speed of 16 Gbps. The Seagate Ironwolf Pro, one of the fastest SATA hard disks, has a read speed of just 2.3 Gbps.