Can you download steam games to external hard drive

If you want to move the folder to an external drive manually, you can instead select 'Browse Local Files' in step four from the above steps. This will open the folder in your operating system's file explorer. Go up one level — that is, open the folder that contains the folder that Steam opened for you. By default, Steam labels this folder 'common.

On a Mac, instead click and drag the folder into the external hard drive's Finder window while holding the Option key. You can play the game directly from the external hard drive, but it'll still require a Steam connection.

If you already know where that resides, then skip along. Note down the path to the folder and head over to File Explorer. Now you're inside File Explorer, navigate to the location of the folder from the previous step. Connect your external drive to your PC and go inside the 'Steam' folder, and by default games will be inside 'steamapps' and then 'common'. Install Steam. I'm considering installing a load of games I rarely play on large external hard drive downloading games takes forever.

Will Steam accept this and run fine or am I headed to problems if I try. Showing 1 - 8 of 8 comments. Steam doesn't like external drives, but they do function, yes. Aside from many potential performance issues, external hard drives may connect or disconnect from the computer at inopportune times as part of their normal operations.

If you encounter this issue with an external drive, install Steam and your games to an internal drive instead. I assume they're using a standard USB 3. Satoru View Profile View Posts. Also note that external hard drives like this are not designed to be used this way and their design means your drives and controllers are going to die much more quickly Functionally today external drives are all passively cooled and by that I mean like there is literally no cooling at all.

Connect your external hard drive to your PC. Open Windows Explorer and create a new folder on the external hard drive. Open Library, choose the game you want to move, right-click it and select Properties.

The steps only suit to move a game each time. If you want to move more than one game or get a better method, you can read how to move steam game to another drive. The manual solution for moving Blizzard games to an external hard drive relates to uninstall and reinstall. It will spend more time in the redownloading process. We also provide more than one fix about moving Blizzard games to another drive.

Open the Blizzard Battle. In the Blizzard Battle. Then select Start Install. Case 4 applies to move games on all game platforms to an external hard drive. In general, no matter what games you install, you will find the default game location store in C:Program FilesWindows Apps. Even though the method is workable, you can not copy some hidden files to the destination, which causes your games to fail in play. So why not try the reliable one to copy with transferring games from pc to external hard drive?

As a data migrating software, this PC transfer tool helps transfer your data, applications, and account settings from one PC to another in one click.

Yes, you can. The best external hard drives are extremely easy to use. All you need to do is plug them in. Besides, an external hard drive can be a great way to install games on multiple computers. Generally speaking, no file formatting is needed to use an external hard drive for gaming.

Yes, Macs don't care where programs are launched from - there is no especially blessed location, so you can run them off an external drive.