Can you play sims 4 with an external hard drive?
I have one on the way, but it won't take a short time, so if possible I would cancel the order if it were not possible to play with an external hard drive. Thanks.
Forum Discussion
I did, I had a Seagate external drive. I now moved to an internal disk, I haven't noticed a difference.
Okay so just to confirm because my laptop is really old and but my partners is new but I don’t want to take up there storage. I can run the game fully off the external not having any saved data on the laptop it’s self?
HI @xLEMN11
You can only move the game files to an external folder. The game also creates a user folder in documents but that can't be redirected. So your user data will always be in the hard drive of your partner.
Also running the game from external drives has it's downsides, especially when you remove the drive and it potentially gets a new drive assigned.
- i was wondering can you solve this? I have moved all of my game content including origin and the application (the sims 4 ) itself to an external hard drive. that was some time ago - now when i open the game from my external hard drive none of my saves or content is there and it opens as if the game is new. I have noticed this is because it is not referencing the Electronic Arts folder that is on my external hard drive - but instead creating a new Electronic Arts folder on my macs Documents tab and using that one instead (which obviously is new and has no saves) i have tried re-installing/downloading the game to my external hard drive and ensuring the location it is installed is always my external hard drive but it still makes a new electronic arts folder on my macs hard drive? I have contacted you once with this issue and I’ve tried moving my game application into my macs applications folder but the issue is not resolved ☹️
So if I buy a Seagate Expansion 1TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive for my asus laptop, will it work for the sims 4?
@REOFOX08 You could certainly install Sims 4 on an external hard drive. How well it would work would still depend on your computer's internal components though: processor, graphics card, memory. And playing from an external drive would be slower than playing from your internal drive, perhaps by a significant amount depending on how fast the internal drive is.
If you'd like to get a general idea of how your computer might handle Sims 4, please list the internal components I mentioned, or even better, run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.
https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/
Hi! Eventually my saved files took up more space than the original application itself. I've managed to transfer my saved files to my external hard drive and have the game save all files to that location, kudos to reddit user melmano: you can look at her post here; her explanation is really clear!
If you're using a Mac, what we're looking at is creating SymLinks - we want our desktop/ laptop to be able to access the folder (Documents > Electronic Arts) on our hard drive as though the folder were on it itself. I followed the instructions here to create it and you may also need this if you're not too familiar with paths. Hope this helps! 🙂
Hi,
Don't know if you've already solved this. But I recently got an MacBook Pro, and didn't want to take up any memory on the laptop itself. I bought a My Passport for Mac, and it's running great. I haven't really noticed any problems, or lag in loading. I made sure to download Origin to the external first, and it had no problems with that either.
Hopefully this helps.
Yeah it would load files fine off an external drive. Especially if it was trhough an eSATA port, which is the same as being directly plugged into a SATA port and you notice zero difference in latency or read/write speed. USB 3 is a bit more sluggish in writes but in reads its not that bad, especially if its an SSD you'd barely notice much difference.
Some possibly false info here about the documents folder. You can actually tell that to be saved somewhere else. You just right click on Documents folder and click properties, then add a folder to your external drive. Then "Set Save Location"
This in theory should make every single game that would save to the Documents folder then be saved to wherever the new folder is.... You could predict some problems doing this since some games, and especially older ones wouldn't go by this setting and may manually still try to save it to the Documents folder on C:\ or wherever you have windows installed.
Personally I wouldn't do this, I would keep it in its default location and just back up the folder every so often. But if you were totally empty on C drive for space and used a lot of big mods, then maybe try this. Also may be useful if you wanted to store everything, saves and the actual game in one drive so you could transport it to different PC's more easily but each new PC would have to have its documents folder re-directed...
but Backup the entire documents at least twice first though before you do anything.
I'm in the exact same situation, except when I try to play the sims, it just jumps up and down and freezes. How did you place the files and applications? Did you have to change the path? If so, how did you do it?
Hi there! I see you're a MacBook user like me. I no longer have enough space on my MacBook for my game and all my mods and CC so I bought an external hard drive and copied my game files to the hard drive. The issue I'm running into is that I cannot change the path on Origin to use the files on the external. Are you saying you downloaded Origin to the external itself or changed the path? I won't be able to play with the upcoming game update and EP if I can't get this to work. Thanks!
@militarymama27 Please see this thread for instructions and troubleshooting for installing Sims 4 onto an external drive in macOS:
If you want to move your user data to the external drive as well, please read this post:
https://bluebellflora.com/saving-your-sims-4-folder-to-an-external-drive/
Community Highlights
- EA_Cade11 months ago
Community Manager
