Ark on external hard drive issue

[Vendrielys]

So I installed Ark onto my external hard drive yesterday. It's a Seagate 1TB and it connects from USB 3.0. I set Steam to create a new folder on it and everything and it installer perfectly fine.

When I woke up today I noticed when I tried to run it that in my Steam library it says that it is uninstalled and instead of the play button there's the install button. When I click the shortcut that it made when I downloaded it to the drive, it just goes to the installation info. I checked my drive and everything is how I left it when I went to bed.

I also tried to go into the properties menu into the local data section and see if I could fix anything in there, but since it says that it's not installed, I can't set the path to run it to the drive. Idk what to do at this point. Did I waste my money on the hard drive or is there a fix to this? Any help is appreciated.

[zerassar]

Many games don't like running from an external drive. If using external drives you're best to use an e-sata drive rather than USB. It's because the e-sata drive appears as an internal drive not external.

unsure if you can fix it, hopefully someone else has tried it before on USB.

[𝔇ave]

if you correctly configured the drive to be a part of the steam library then it's possible that when you shut off your pc the drive is rediscovered upon next boot and steam no longer recognises it as the drive you set up.. if that's the case im not sure how you would get around that other than maybe configuring your pc bios to leave the usb power on while the pc itself is off. may or may not work idk

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8379-RYIP-2998

[Vendrielys]

Originally posted by zerassar:

Many games don't like running from an external drive. If using external drives you're best to use an e-sata drive rather than USB. It's because the e-sata drive appears as an internal drive not external.

unsure if you can fix it, hopefully someone else has tried it before on USB.

Originally posted by Dave:

if you correctly configured the drive to be a part of the steam library then it's possible that when you shut off your pc the drive is rediscovered upon next boot and steam no longer recognises it as the drive you set up.. if that's the case im not sure how you would get around that other than maybe configuring your pc bios to leave the usb power on while the pc itself is off. may or may not work idk

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8379-RYIP-2998

Thanks so much for the suggestions.

[Vendrielys]

For anyone else who may be looking at this and having the same issue as me, Dave's suggestion did work. Just plug the hard drive back in, restart your pc and it should work perfectly fine.

[kudos]

You can go to steam setting and select to show that Library too a lot faster.

[Veeshan]

Is the transfer speed sufficient? Tried recording footage to an external once, didnt work out...

[Vendrielys]

Originally posted by Veeshan:

Is the transfer speed sufficient? Tried recording footage to an external once, didnt work out...

If you mean transferring as in moving from the internal to external, it's real slow. When I transferred Ark to my drive by dragging it and dropping it it took a solid 8+ hours, and then I found out it didn't properly move itself so I had to reinstall it entirely. From that I found directly installing to the drive is MUCH faster. If you record set the destination for when it's finished to your external. Should work fine then.

[Veeshan]

Originally posted by ✠Kalcium Kaiserin✠:

Originally posted by Veeshan:

Is the transfer speed sufficient? Tried recording footage to an external once, didnt work out...

If you mean transferring as in moving from the internal to external, it's real slow. When I transferred Ark to my drive by dragging it and dropping it it took a solid 8+ hours, and then I found out it didn't properly move itself so I had to reinstall it entirely. From that I found directly installing to the drive is MUCH faster. If you record set the destination for when it's finished to your external. Should work fine then.

I mean while playing. Ark does a lot of streaming...

I was recording 1080p so the bandwidth was too much for usb 2.0. Might work with 3.0 these days I suppose.

[Vendrielys]

Originally posted by Veeshan:

Originally posted by ✠Kalcium Kaiserin✠:

If you mean transferring as in moving from the internal to external, it's real slow. When I transferred Ark to my drive by dragging it and dropping it it took a solid 8+ hours, and then I found out it didn't properly move itself so I had to reinstall it entirely. From that I found directly installing to the drive is MUCH faster. If you record set the destination for when it's finished to your external. Should work fine then.

I mean while playing. Ark does a lot of streaming...

I was recording 1080p so the bandwidth was too much for usb 2.0. Might work with 3.0 these days I suppose.

Yeah. Only USB 3.0.