Buying an external SSD hard drive

Playing the game on an external drive will actually hinder gamer performance. You can try shifting non-game-related things like photos and files onto that external drive but 223GB is still pretty small to work with. Another option is to copy your OS + all the info onto a bigger internal SSD but this will void the laptop warranty if it's still valid.

It is possible to play the game on an external drive but you will not be seeing a boost in performance.

Okay, I'm going to be assuming your internal SSD is not an NVMe but is an SATA drive. If you have a USB C port on your laptop and use that for your external drive, you will not notice a difference between it and the internal drive. SATA communicates at 6.0GB/s , and USB C at 10.0GB/s (iow, faster than SATA). Even USB 3.0 (the blue plug) communicates at 5.0 GB/s and you probably wouldn't notice any difference on that either. The actual bottleneck is the drive itself.

So there won't be any performance difference. If you do decide to use an external SSD, it may make sense to move all your games to it and continue to install CC and such to your main drive. It's less hassle to do it that way and just by moving your games you'll be freeing up a lot of space. Also, if you keep the downloads of your CC, you can also store that on your external drive. Another option is to set up a symbiotic symbolic link to the external drive of mods folder (or your entire Sims 4 folder that's located in My Documents). There are a lot of guides to doing that on the web.

However, again, you probably won't notice too much of a difference in performance. I think it's a good idea to have extra space, though.

I play Sims 4 and also some of my Steam games off an external drive but it comes down to the types of ports that are available such as Thunderbolt, generation of USB the current generation for USB is 3.2, ESata which still exist but is not expanded on these days. Also the age of one's system can influence one's decision on what they use. I still prefer local connections but am good with an external connection as one has to look at the data transfer of each port and is it constant and for me it been good. But as far as performance goes as said already by others it does not really give you an edge on performance, but even that is changing though.

Thank you all for your replies! What would you suggest for boosting performance? Upgrading the ram maybe?

You can add more RAM if you're sure the CPU is strong enough that it wont simply bottle neck the extra ram thereby leaving you back to square one.

"Cassieb95;c-17957847" wrote:
Thank you all for your replies! What would you suggest for boosting performance? Upgrading the ram maybe?

More ram memory definitely helps with loading times. You can check online to see how much total ram memory your computer can take. Also make sure you clean your internet browsing history as a lot of junk gets stored there that eventually ends up taking a lot of space on the hard drive. You can store on an external drive all stuff you don't actually need for the game like screenshots, cc you don't regularly use, personal photos and music.