Mod Organizer and Skyrim on separate drives

[tehpandemic]

I did a bit of searching regarding this, but I couldn't find anything to truly answer my question.

 

My base skyrim directory is at S:SteamSteamAppscommonSkyrim (Solid State Drive)

My mod organizer directory for skyrim is at C:GamesSkyrim ToolsMod Organizer (Hard Disk Drive)

 

Because they are both installed on different drives, to sum it all up, will I gain any sort of performance increase ingame if I were to move my MO installation over to my SSD, or does the virtualization process take care of this?

 

Is skyrim essentially reading from a virtualized directory on the HDD or the SSD?

[Nearox]

If you have both on an SSD, it will go faster, yes. How much faster? That depends on how large the mod organizer mods dir is. It can easily go up to 20, 30 or 40gb when you have many mods installed.

 

If you got the space, definitely put both on your SSD. It will likely reduce stutter, or at least it'll take one obstacle (slow HDD read speed) away towards getting a heavyily modded Skyrim to run smooth.

Edited July 14, 2014 by Nearox

[tehpandemic]

Thanks for the clarification. I have a couple of separate mod organizer installs specifically for skyrim, one is for STEP and its packs, and the other is for my own tinkering and whatnot.

 

I'll give it a go in moving one of them over and see what improvement there may be.

[Tuggi]

Putting both MO and skyrim on a SSD will help immensely with load times. But You can save a lot of space by setting the MO download folder to not the SSD.

 

Configure settings-> general tab. advance check box. set the downloads folder to wherever you want a ton of archives stored.

[Marthenil]

So, after my step installation, I have an issue of huge loading times. Performance is extremely solid (80/100 fps outside without VSync) but the loading times are huge. I'm talking 4 minutes +

Now, in retrospective, after having figured what MO actually does, my initial thought of being smart and saving space by having mods installed in my regular drive instead of the SSD is not so smart.

So my question really is, is there a way to safely move them to the SSD without even risking losing 2 days of mod installation? 

[generalmx]

You can configure all the directories in MO, so I'd just do the copy, reconfigure it to the new directory on the SSD, restart MO.

 

Note that the time MO needs to setup the virtual filesystem does add time whether you're on a SSD or HDD, and really the only way you'll be able to get a fully S.T.E.P. Extended setup of the ~200 mods and ~100 plugins starting about as quick as vanilla Skyrim is to start and then quit Skyrim, letting the files then be cached in memory; really though we're only talking about several extra seconds with a modern SSD.

[Kelmych]

I have Skyrim installed on an SSD, and MO on an HDD. However, I have the Mod Organizermods directory on the SSD since those files are the files that are provided to Skyrim using the VFS. MO allows configuring the location of the mods, downloads, and webcache directories.

[DoubleYou]

Backup your profiles before you do the move! If you do things wrong, you could lose your install order, so simply back them up, move it, redirect to MO, restore.