Separating the game and mods
Hello! I come bearing a question about The Sims 4 and storage space/what drive it loads from.
Right now, I have all my Sims content on one drive, say D:. Specifically, D:\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4 has the mods, tray, saves, etc. And D:\Games\The Sims 4 has the game/launcher.
However, I recently got a new drive; it originally wasn't meant for The Sims 4, but this drive (call it E: ) runs faster than the D: one, and since I had some storage left over on E:, I figured I could try to run Sims from there.
It doesn't have enough storage for all of the Sims content, however; it'll either only fit the game itself, or my massive mod folder lol, not both. So my question was - can I separate the two? Can I have my mod folder on D:, for example, and the game itself on E: and then run the game from the latter and still have access to my mods? If yes - which way would be smarter to make sure the game runs faster? Should I put my mods on E:, or the game? Note - when I talk about 'mods', I guess I mean the whole Electronic Arts folder in D:. I'm assuming I can't JUST have my mods folder separate, I'd need the whole folder with the save files, tray, mods, etc. in one place, right?
Thank you in advance!
-----
Edit: Tested it, mods work even when the game & mod folder are on two separate drives.
@lucainato What drives are you talking about here? The way Sims 4 is programmed, it can't take advantage of the speed of an NVME solid state drive over a SATA SSD, although both are an improvement over a mechanical drive (HDD). So if D is any kind of SSD, it doesn't really matter what's on D and what's on E—the limiting factor will be the game itself.
If D is an HDD, whether it helps more to move the game's program files to E or the user folder (or just the Mods folder) depends on how much is in the Mods folder. If it's a lot, then having Mods on E will likely be more beneficial; if it's a little, it would be better to move the game's program files to E. I can't really tell you where the line is though because it's about both the amount of custom content (not so much mods) and the type. You may also notice different results for the initial loading screen vs. travel transitions.
If you're not sure, I would suggest experimenting a bit. And if you don't actually notice a difference, you don't really need to worry about a few seconds gained or lost here or there.
