The size of today’s video games is huge. Gone are the days when a full AAA game took up only 2GB of external SSD hard drive space (and some of us remember when games used to fit on floppy disks).
With games like Red Dead Redemption 2 hogging up to 150GB of our hard drive space, storing your games on an external hard drive has never been more appealing.
With so many people now using External SSD for Gaming as their primary boot drives, gamers need additional space to store their games and personal information while maintaining the speed and responsiveness of a solid-state OS disc.
Is it possible to play games with an external hard drive?
External hard drives, often known as portable hard drives, are small mass storage devices that are attached to a computer through USB or Thunderbolt.
Internally, these portable hard drives are essentially internal HDDs housed in a USB shell, making it easy to disconnect and reattach drives while also protecting them from knocks and shocks.
When attached to your computer’s USB port, these hard drives will work virtually identically to any other storage device for PC users. You may save game files on these drives and launch them quickly with shortcuts on your desktop.
How to Play Games on a PC with an External Hard Drive:
Game Installation on an External Hard Drive
When utilizing your brand-new portable hardware of computer drive, the first thing you should do is read the ‘Quick Start’ guide that came with it.
If your drive is labeled as plug-and-play, you may insert it into any available USB port and it will display as a storage drive in ‘My Computer’ (or by Locations on Mac).
Before using some drives, you may need to download drivers. For downloads, go through your handbook or go to your manufacturer’s website.
Format your hard disc drive
The next step is to format your hard disc. Not only will this remove any factory-installed default files, but it will also guarantee that the disc is formatted to the right file system.
The default file system used by Windows is NFTS, or New Technology File System, which is pre-formatted on most high-capacity drives. Due to its maximum file size of 4GB, we wish to avoid using the File Allocation Table or FAT32 file system.
Numerous game.bin files will surpass this limit (particularly those designed for 64-bit systems), and FAT32 will prevent you from installing many games on the disc.
If your drive has to be utilized across platforms, consider adopting the exFAT file system instead of NFTS. This eliminates the 4GB restriction while allowing files to be viewed on both Windows and Mac computers.
After the drive has been formatted, it will be assigned a drive letter. Keep this in mind so you know where to install games.
Install Games on Your Computer
For the sake of demonstration, we’ll look at how to install Steam games on portable discs. Other game launchers, such as Epic Games and Origin, should follow a similar procedure; all you have to do is pick the external disc as your default install place.
Select the ‘Steam’ option in the top toolbar and go to ‘Settings’ to configure Steam. Then, on the sidebar, look for the ‘Downloads’ window, where you’ll discover the first choice, ‘Steam Library Folders.’
What are the advantages of using an external hard drive for gaming?
Using external hard drives increases your storage space, allowing you to install more games on your hard disc. It’s ideal for people who want to put their operating system on a smaller SSD so that they don’t fill up their larger disc.
Another factor to consider is portability. You may move your game installs to other devices, such as a relative’s or friend’s computer, by using a portable drive. You’ll need to check in to game launchers like Steam, but you should be able to access your games catalog from numerous devices.
