I have a Macbook Air M3 with 24GB of RAM and I'm using Crossover with a Windows version of Steam to play some games. I've set up an external SSD as a new library for game files, but I'm running into some confusing storage issues. Most games appear to take up double the space on the SSD compared to what's reported in Steam and macOS. For instance, Terraria shows as 600MB in Steam but takes up 15.3GB on my SSD, and applications like DaisyDisk report that it's actually using 31GB. I've already tried transferring games to a second library on the SSD and even reinstalled Steam completely, but the problem persists. I'm considering a factory reset to see if that helps. Does anyone have any advice on how to solve this storage issue?
2 Answers
This sounds pretty frustrating! It could be related to how files are managed in Steam or the way they're being unpacked. Some games have compressed files that take up more space once they're extracted. Make sure you're running the latest version of Steam, though unforunately it might just be a quirk of running it on dual systems.
It might help to format your SSD and ensure your firmware is up to date. That can sometimes fix weird storage issues. I’ve had better luck with NTFS for gaming drives, but keep in mind you’ll need to make sure your Mac can read that before doing it.
Format was already done, and it’s exFAT since I have both Mac and Windows games on there. I thought of switching to NTFS, but wasn't sure it was worth the hassle.
That makes sense about the extracted files. It’s just annoying how much space they take up! I'm on the latest version, but it seems like the game sizes are still way off.