Mods on external HDD?

[Richard I]

I have the game and mods installed on an external HDD with Vortex. However, the game just plays vanilla, no mods, even though 23 mods are installed and enabled.

Wondering if I chose the wrong filepath? There is a folder called steamlibrary on the external HDD that all my games go to, I directed the vortex path to the fallout 4 mods folder in that steamlibrary folder. Would that be right?

[JDaremo Fireheart]

Mods should always be installed on the same drive as the game and your mod management program and never on an external hard drive.
There are many discussion here already about this topic. just do a search for them.

[Richard I]

Originally posted by JDaremo Fireheart:

Mods should always be installed on the same drive as the game and your mod management program and never on an external hard drive.
There are many discussion here already about this topic. just do a search for them.

I installed them all on the external HDD, including the mod management software. I did this because my SSD is only 256GB and fallout 4 would take a massive chunk of that. I already don’t have enough disk space and I moved most of my games over to the external

[Azure Fang]

Originally posted by Farmer Ted's:

Originally posted by JDaremo Fireheart:

Mods should always be installed on the same drive as the game and your mod management program and never on an external hard drive.
There are many discussion here already about this topic. just do a search for them.

I installed them all on the external HDD, including the mod management software. I did this because my SSD is only 256GB and fallout 4 would take a massive chunk of that. I already don’t have enough disk space and I moved most of my games over to the external

Using a non-permanent drive with Steam games is already notoriously problematic. If you're going through the trouble, buy an internal storage drive ans move your games there so you can keep your mods with your games.

[JDaremo Fireheart]

I agree with Azure. Internal drives are more reliable as well. External ones are subject to disconnects and if that happens while playing a game, the game or save could be corrupted.
You can get internals that are quite inexpensive now. Western Digital Blue HDDs are reliable and inexpensive. 2Tb for only 70 cdn or about 50 or 60 usd

[Richard I]

Originally posted by JDaremo Fireheart:

I agree with Azure. Internal drives are more reliable as well. External ones are subject to disconnects and if that happens while playing a game, the game or save could be corrupted.
You can get internals that are quite inexpensive now. Western Digital Blue HDDs are reliable and inexpensive. 2Tb for only 70 cdn or about 50 or 60 usd

Would it work better than an SSD though? I was told SSD's work far better.

[Zekiran]

If they are all on the same drive it literally won't matter. But they MUST be on the same drive as the game. Why would your computer need to look everywhere just to find things that should absolutely be in the same folder?

If you have space problems *get a larger drive* and put your steam games on it together with whatever mods they have. You're going to fill it anyway.

Put your OS on a single dedicated drive. Data that isn't games on another. Games and music or whatever larger files on another much larger drive.

[Azure Fang]

Originally posted by Farmer Ted's:

Originally posted by JDaremo Fireheart:

I agree with Azure. Internal drives are more reliable as well. External ones are subject to disconnects and if that happens while playing a game, the game or save could be corrupted.
You can get internals that are quite inexpensive now. Western Digital Blue HDDs are reliable and inexpensive. 2Tb for only 70 cdn or about 50 or 60 usd

Would it work better than an SSD though? I was told SSD's work far better.

Yes, SSDs are faster, but they also come with their own negatives.

• Cost/Space ratio is still significantly higher than HDDs.
  
• Cost vs. Performance Gain value is subjective.
  
• Storage-grade sizes are just starting to become mainstream available (for higher prices).
  
• Some games do not play well with improved load speeds; Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, for example, has numerous breakdown issues due to assets loading faster than engine can handle them if you install on an SSD.
  
• Even the newest SSD tech still wears down faster than an HDD. This has improved dramatically in recent years, but it remains an issue worth considering.
  
• Write times increase drastically as available space decreases, and at high space usage this leads to overall decreased file access performance.
  
• They are not, and never will be, the magic bullet that many tout them to be for performance.

Yes, it is fact that load speeds will improve on most software installed on a SSD as long as it's relating to raw file read/write. However, raw file access is only one factor. SSDs have no impact on rendering and calculations done by the CPU and GPU or any hard-coded limits in the software itself.

The best use for SSDs is having a small OS/system-dedicated drive which, if you're running Windows, you need to keep ~20% drive space (HDD or SSD) free for optimal performance which nobody does even though Windows warns people with that red space usage bar, then a second SSD for especially read/write intense software/games. After that, a high-cache (256MB), 7200RPM HDD like a high-cap WD Black does just fine for about 90% of games (as well as all of your secondary software that can have install location changed) with a negligible hit to load times by comparison as long as you keep the drive clean (you should never fill any drive past 90%, let alone 80%, to leave room for efficient read/write/rewrite actions that take place as part of normal file access as part of all modern filesystems). It's worth mentioning, however, that one should be certain of their motherboard's architecture before going hybrid SSD+HDD; some bus architecture shares pipelines between SDD interface and SATA, and this implementation will slow down SSDs if an HDD is present.