I am going to get a MacBook Air but the hard drive space is fairly small. I just wanted some clarification on installing games onto a hard drive. If I install steam on my hard drive will the downloaded games also install onto it? And will they run ok off it?
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possible duplicate of Install Steam on an external drive? – Private Pansy Nov 16 '13 at 13:14
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But if a download a game, will it install on the external drive? And take up no space on my hard drive. – Sashley Nov 16 '13 at 13:31
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2@PrivatePansy That question is about using an external drive installation to run Steam on multiple computers. The answers are useful for this question as well, but the question is not the same. – 3ventic Nov 16 '13 at 13:43
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1Agreed. This is written as more of a "where will the steam library of games be saved to if I install steam on an external drive?" As such I've updated the title with the question from the body – Robotnik Nov 22 '13 at 05:12
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Yes and sort of. External hard drives tend to run slower because of their interface/cable (usually USB).
As far as installing games go, you can install steam anywhere on your laptop and set up the game libraries/install locations somewhere else, like an external drive. Go to Settings > Downloads to set up game libraries. Keep in mind you need to have read/write and execute permissions (don't know if OSX gives you execute permissions on external drives).
Baseballs
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Well, it's still not going to be as fast as running from the internal disk, but still waaay faster than USB 2.0. – Baseballs Nov 16 '13 at 16:57
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Something like this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/714289-gaming-usb-3-0-flash-drive.html ? – Baseballs Nov 16 '13 at 17:09
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So after partial reading that, it seems to me that some more advanced games (although maybe not truly demanding ones) can be played safely through USB 3.0, the only disadvantage being the (a little bit) slower level loading times. But it's a great tradeoff when talking disk space on tiny HDD's or SSD's. – Edeph Nov 16 '13 at 17:14
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Yup. Pretty much. I can imagine that games like Fallout 3/NV would die at the loading times, considering that most of it's game data are just individual files, uncompressed and scattered around the install folder. – Baseballs Nov 17 '13 at 11:11
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For what it's worth, I successfully played TF2 / Dota 2 via USB 3 HD. Just make sure that a) It's really a USB 3 drive b) you are directly connected, no slow USB hubs. – Tom Sep 19 '14 at 10:54
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Technically, it does work.
Practically, it won't for bigger games. That is due to external hard drives being connected via USB and that is just too slow to keep up with texture streaming for demanding games.
What you can do is this:
- Install Steam to your mac book, not to your external drive
- Setup an additional steam library on your external
- Install demanding games directly to your mac book
- Install small games to your external.
With this kind of split it would at least be possible to play most games without any issue and have full performance for bigger games.
For being able to install a game to a different hard drive, you need to go to Settings -> Downloads and designated a folder as Steam Library:
If you have multiple libraries, a selection will be shown where to install the game when you download it.
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@Sashley http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/126505/what-happens-if-you-install-a-steam-game-to-a-removable-drive/, http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/1580/is-it-possible-to-install-steam-games-to-two-different-locations?lq=1 – 3ventic Nov 16 '13 at 13:38