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night0ceans's avatar
night0ceans
3 months ago
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Sims 4 Mac & PC: External Drive?

Hello, I own two computers: A Windows laptop, and a new MacBook. I play the sims 4 very frequently and play the same save file everyday. I recently bought a 1TB external SSD drive. Is there a simpl...
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  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    3 months ago

    @night0ceans  There's no simple way to do this because Windows and macOS need to use different formats for the external drive.  In macOS, mods and custom content will only work if the drive is formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), neither of which Windows can read.  While FAT32/exFAT is compatible with both OSs, trying to use mods stored on a drive using this format will cause errors in macOS.

    What you could do is partition the drive into three: APFS for Mac, NTFS for Windows, and exFAT for transferring between the two.  It would be like having three smaller drives in one enclosure.  This would still require you to transfer files back and forth, but after the initial transfer, you'd only be copying smaller files, which shouldn't take too much time with an SSD.  For any new mods or cc, you'd have to add them to both drives, once in each OS.

    If you want to do this, use Disk Utility to format the drive as APFS in macOS first, then slice off a large chunk of it and format that as exFAT.  Plug the drive into Windows, which I believe won't even recognize the APFS partition, and split the exFAT segment, formatting one part as NTFS.

    One other possible option is paying for third-party software that lets your Mac write to NTFS-formatted drives.  It does work in general, but I don't know whether it works for Sims 4 and how well, so you'd need to be willing to test yourself.

puzzlezaddict's avatar
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
3 months ago

@night0ceans  There's no simple way to do this because Windows and macOS need to use different formats for the external drive.  In macOS, mods and custom content will only work if the drive is formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), neither of which Windows can read.  While FAT32/exFAT is compatible with both OSs, trying to use mods stored on a drive using this format will cause errors in macOS.

What you could do is partition the drive into three: APFS for Mac, NTFS for Windows, and exFAT for transferring between the two.  It would be like having three smaller drives in one enclosure.  This would still require you to transfer files back and forth, but after the initial transfer, you'd only be copying smaller files, which shouldn't take too much time with an SSD.  For any new mods or cc, you'd have to add them to both drives, once in each OS.

If you want to do this, use Disk Utility to format the drive as APFS in macOS first, then slice off a large chunk of it and format that as exFAT.  Plug the drive into Windows, which I believe won't even recognize the APFS partition, and split the exFAT segment, formatting one part as NTFS.

One other possible option is paying for third-party software that lets your Mac write to NTFS-formatted drives.  It does work in general, but I don't know whether it works for Sims 4 and how well, so you'd need to be willing to test yourself.

  • night0ceans's avatar
    night0ceans
    3 months ago

    Hi @puzzlezaddict  -- Thank you for your response! Would it work if i just transferred my files? Like for example if i wanna update my mods folder on my mac, I just zip it on my windows pc, put it on the external ssd and drop it onto my macbook? I did that a while back with a usb key it was just extremely slow because the USB key was old.

    Thank you again!

    • puzzlezaddict's avatar
      puzzlezaddict
      Hero+
      3 months ago

      @night0ceans  Sorry for the late reply; I've had too little free time to do much on this site lately.  And yes, you could absolutely copy whatever files you want to your Mac and run them from there.  If you have enough internal storage and don't need to put the files on the SSD, then there's no reason to do so.

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