Is there a proper way to get games to run from an external hard drive?

[Dan the Man]

I'm running low on memory on my laptop, and was considering installing my Steam games to an external hard drive I own to play them from there (Yes, I am aware that there will be a slight drop in performance, but the ports and drive itself are USB 3.0, so I don't mind a little dip in power).
So, saying this, I have a few questions for people far more gifted at this subject than I am.

- Is there a special method to installing and setting up Steam games to another hard drive, for can I just move them over manually without any special treatment?

- Will Steam still properly launch a game installed on an external drive?

- What about DLC I buy for the game, updates, or mods from the Workshop and things like Nexus? Do downloads for the game still install properly even if the game is on an external hard drive?

- Can some games be on my Laptop's hard drive and some be on the external drive? Or do they all have to be in the same locaion?

Any insight or advice anyone could provide would be extremely helpful.

[Norhams Finest]

hey, the easiest way to to this is by creating a symbolic link to the external hardrive. A symbolic link is like a link that to the computer looks like a regular folder but it really links to your external harddrive. I use this tool http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html to make my links. if you need more help just let me know!

[Bad 💀 Motha]

It doesn't matter if the ports are USB 3.0, the drive has to support that spec to use that read/write speed. If the drive only supports 2.0, well the read/write speed for a game running from that drive is going to be quite slow.

You can create a folder on an external drive and then designate it to be used by Steam for installing games by going into Steam > Settings > Downloads and adding extra folder locations under Steam Library Folders. Once u have more than one folder listed, Steam from now on will ask u upon game install, where u want to install it to.

If your C drive is filling up, then perhaps delete some games off of there to free up space. You could move certain ones to your external drive, but not all games work well when doing this, as it will most likely already have entries in the registry that all point to its current location.

[Larry's Bird]

Just install the games like you would on your regular hard drive on your external one. It's essentially the same thing. Or you could also move your non program files like music, movies, documents to your external drive to free up space on your internal drive. Also remember you don't have to have everyone of your steam games installed. You can re-download steam games anytime, and however much you want. So maybe delete some of those old games you don't play.