Right now there are at least two different reviewers saying two different things on this topic. The first, and here I forget if it was Retro Game Corps or ETA Prime (I think it’s RGC) who said they did a straight up SSD transfer (i.e. no copying nothing), and it worked perfecto.

But Taki Udon says he did the exact same thing and there were some glitches such as hardware issues that he thinks Valve will eventually fix if we are patient.

So one guy says works fine, the other says will probably work fine in the future but not now. We will have to wait and see I guess?

BTW, if a straight SSD transfer were to work, then it would be the simplest way to transfer (you’d just do an SSD swaparoo between the two decks). Or you could use Macrium Reflect to duplicate on of the SSDs if you didn’t want to swap.

This is actually how it works. Steam has a database of all the games you installed and where you installed them, and it will look for them there. If the media is removed, it stays greyed out until the media is reinserted. The only problem is, I have no clue where Steam stores this database, only that it is somewhere on your main drive. If you move the entire drive over, you would automatically move the hidden database file and so you won’t have to reinstall your games. What would be better though is if Steam has an actual database export utility for this situation for people who might not want to move the entire hard drive over.