OS, Games, & VMs (Debian gaming)

Is it worth putting Games & VMs on a separate drive than the OS if you have a 990 pro?
Does anyone use symbolic links to map game folders from a secondary drive to a home folder?

I’ve ordered a new drive and wondering how i should re-install and reconfigure. My current drive is an ADATA SX8200 and has a read/write of 2,250MB/s

Or do i create partitions, then mount inside my homefolder for steam games?

For me I have my steam game folder on a separate drive. My primary drive is only a 500gb capacity ssd so there is not a lot of room to install games on it. where is my secondary drive is a 2tb ssd which is plenty of space for game storage!

This also had the advantage of making my transition to linux 1000x better as I didn’t have to keep downloading all my games every time I messed up the os. Just install steam and point to the games folder and boom. DONE!

I don’t like to pile on canonical, I think most of it is unjustified but this is the reason snap steam disallows itself, & therefore - ubuntu, from my prime desktop*.

On debian however, sure you could ln -s the volume into ~/Games (for Heroic launcher or native games) - steam should however recognise on its own that there is another volume attached and I’d advise to consider its own config to define as such, instead of using the OS to lie to it with a soft link - Steam > Settings > Storage > and set the new ssd as default.

It’ll still work if you do use soft links, but it’s possible to end up with a couple entries in (steam) storage with the same name. This means the steam application config is under your normal $HOME (if you plan to reinstall a lot), but you can later add the volume again (with all the data) if you need to.

praise saint Gabe.

* (it uses hardcoded paths it’ll accept - ~ &/media ; (I don’t use /media for permanent mounts and I’m not changing, email any complaints to 2002); links don’t work, though bind mounts do.

I have Steam pointed to a second SSD inside of Steam (Steam > Settings > Storage).

R/W throughput is not that helpful for gaming, something something shoddy software…

There are two sources of fun when you using Linux:
a) messing around with distros, file systems, desktop environments, etc.
b) your distro f**ked up
So yeah, definitely worth to not only install all your games on a separate drive, also keep all your files separately from the drive of your OS.

To be clear, the main reason I did this is the size of my game library when installed is 2.5 to 3.5 tb installed and that won’t fit on a 500gb drive. Also who wants to keep downloading that much data at the cost of a day to do so?