How do I decide what games to install on hard drive when I have more games then the space on the hard drive (Without upgrading the game drive) Looking for ideas and suggestions for those out there that have the same issue.

How many games do you currently have installed and how many do you want to have?

I have my games on my SSD so I try to save space as much as possible, never more than one modern AAA game that takes muliple gigs because of that. This is good because this makes me focus on the few games I've as otherwise I would install everything as soon as I wanted to play something and then I would never really play anything, only try games.

If you have multiple games you don't aim to complete (open ended, experimental, multiplayer etc..) then choose the ones you want most, I don't really see any specific solution to it on that part other than weighing the pros and cons of what particular games you want installed.

A space saver could be to make sure you complete games that take up a large portion of the drive.

Note that the DOSBox games can go on any drive, including thumb drives. They don't have registry entries and all that stuff to worry about so plop them anywhere.

External drives are fair game, too, for any title though if it's a game that frequently accesses the drive for level loading, you may want to put those on your HDD. Other games, like TBS titles, would be fine on an external.

Between GOG and Steam, I have acquired over a 1,000 games over the years. It can be difficult choosing which games because of so many great ones. I will probably go with your suggestion of only install games that I plan on playing through and then cycling through and keeping on my all time favorite ones installed.

If you have an eye for proportion you could install a few older games that you want to play and leave them be and avoid too many new games at the same time, that way you get variety but you can still have a few installed. I would also avoid multiple, large games of the same genre e.g like long RPGs or Strategy games as they can take weeks or months to play so better focus on one or two at the most.

Currently I don't have a space issue but I can't uninstall games I've spent half of a playthrough with while spent some time tweaking, making sure they work the way I want to and I hate this situation. Once I'm out of it I'm going to stop installing so many games and only focus on a few, less confusion and complications that way. :P

Sorry to go off topic Fosterinn but this seems the perfect place to ask,
Nirth, i though you weren't suposed to install / reinstall stuff frequently with SSDs or have i got that wrong?

Depends on the quality of the SSD which after every generation becomes better and better.

For reference though, with mine I've already 10TB written on it after 2 years of actively using it. SMART technology still reports 98% health. I recently used a benchmark application and during that time I had about 40% free space, it scored 99% as the same when I purchased it except in one area, it had lost about 15% or so.

In general, modern SSDs have a life span of writing 10GB/day up to a few years, depending on the controller and generation, but this is more of a slogan that others use so don't take my word on it if you're in the market for one and if you're, read up on the subject to learn how they work, what makes them different compared to mechanical drives and you don't have to worry about some rumours.

thankyou for the detailed response :)

INSTALL ALL THE GAEMS!

Sounds like you need a new harddrive or two :=)

Well, personally i have few dozen games installed any given time, of which i actively play like 2.

What iippo said: get another hard drive and install all of them.

I have several hard drives in my system and have all my games installed. That way I don't have to go searching for install files (even though I have them backed up in a couple different places) and I don't have to wait for installation when I decide I want to play a specific game. It's turned out to be a perfect solution for me.

My easy solution is to finish the games I start and uninstall them. I'm not much into replaying stuff unless they offer extremely different paths, or different character builds in the case of RPGs. To aid in the finishing of games, I only allow myself to start one or two games at any one time per genre. So for example I'll only have one FPS going, one TPS (third person), one ADV, one or two RPGs (they take forever to finish and I need a bit of variety), one SIM, one RACING, one RTS. I'll play whatever I'm in the mood for, finish it, wipe it, move on to the next thing in that genre. It just takes some self-control. ;D

The upside is I've probably finished about 90% of the stuff I've started, and the rest just given up on if it was not interesting enough. The downside is I have a massive backlog of titles to play dating back 18 years (because I also like to play a series in order, first games first, and so on).