Can I play sims on this laptop WITH external hard drive?
Hi peeps.
I have a HP Pavilion Laptop, 14, intel core i3, 250gb with an SSD processor. If I get an external hard drive, can I store my sims 4 games and expansions on that (mods and all) without taking up all of my disk space and clogging up my laptop?
im not sure how to do it but I could figure it out once I know if it’s even possible my laptop could handle all that.
thanks,
J.
@LuckySimmer Yes, you can store all Sims 4 data on an external drive. Keep in mind though that depending on the speed of the drive and the quality of the connection, the game may run slower on the external drive than it would on the internal one. It's usually better to store data like music or photos on the external: data that only needs to be written once and can be read back more slowly by the system without affecting your enjoyment of it. A game will require constant reads and writes of a significant amount of data, and an external drive will almost certainly be much slower than your laptop's internal SSD.
Having said that, you can install Sims 4 on an external by changing the install location within Origin. (It's best to keep Origin itself on the internal drive, and it doesn't take up much storage other than when it's downloading something.) Be sure to install to a folder within the external—Origin usually refuses to install on the root folder of a drive.
You could always store your Sims 4 user data folder on the external when not using it, and move it back to Documents\Electronic Arts when you wanted to play. If you'd like it to stay on the external though, you'd need to use a symbolic link to tell the game where to find the folder. This is not overly complicated in Windows:
You didn't provide your full specs, but I'm not sure how well the game would even run on your laptop, on the internal drive or otherwise. The base game should be fine, the most demanding packs maybe not, depending on your standards for graphics settings and playability.
