Steam’s installation options for external drives
Apple’s big macOS gaming push is going to quickly fill up your Mac’s storage. Here’s how to install games to an external SSD.
Apple has been working to make gaming on a Mac a bigger thing over the years. With the introduction of the Game Porting Toolkit, it’s encouraging more developers to consider Mac as a gaming platform.
It’s also managed to encourage publishers of major games to bring their titles to Mac. This includes ports from the Resident Evil franchise, Death Stranding, and Hades II, as well as future releases of Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition and Control Ultimate Edition.
While great for gaming, the push does have one potential limiting factor. Mac storage options are not great for consumers.
Capacity conundrum
Triple-A games are often massive in size. Giant open-world games, flashy first-person shooters, and others with considerable graphical needs also often have very large install sizes.
For example, the system requirements for Baldur’s Gate 3 says it needs a minimum of 150 gigabytes. With the minimum storage capacities of Apple’s Mac lineup starting from just 256GB, that could make installing the game in the first place a bit of a challenge.
You could solve the problem by paying for a Mac with a much larger storage capacity, but that can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. Going from 256GB to 512GB in the M4 Mac mini is a $200 premium, with 1TB and 2TB being $400 and $800 add-ons respectively.
External SSDs are cheaper than Apple’s internal storage upgrades – Image credit: SanDisk
AppleInsider has repeatedly given the advice that there are other ways to get more storage for your Mac. Chiefly, this has been in the form of using external storage drives connected via USB-C or Thunderbolt.
For modern Mac mini users, there is the opportunity to perform an aftermarket internal upgrade if you’re desperate to avoid external drives, but few people will willingly take this route.
External upgrades are, by contrast, relatively easy. This can be as simple as buying an external SSD, plugging it into your Mac, and formatting it.
Going down the external drive route can offer speeds comparable to the Mac’s internal storage, with far higher capacities priced considerably lower than Apple’s upgrade cost. While it costs $200 for an extra 256GB of internal storage, you can easily get 2TB of external storage for far less than that price.
External installations
Once you have the external drive installed, there then becomes the matter of actually installing games to the new drive instead of defaulting to the internal storage.
This is actually a fairly straightforward process to undertake, though not necessarily that apparent for people new to gaming. That’s especially the case when you’re used to using the standard options when installing apps, such as from the Mac App Store.
Selecting the installation location for a game in Steam for macOS
What follows is what you need to do to change the installation location when installing three ways: from the Mac App Store, from Steam, and when you’re installing games manually.
Do make sure your external drive is installed and accessible before changing your settings. Also, be aware that some files could still be installed to your primary internal drive, such as save game files.
How to install games from the Mac App Store to an external drive
For the Mac App Store, you will be able to do this once you have updated to macOS Sequoia 15.1 or later.
Setting the Mac App Store to install to external drives
- Open the Mac App Store. In the Menu, select Settings.
- Tick the box next to Download and install large apps to a separate disk. This will automatically download your apps to the nominated external disk.
- Use the dropdown to select your external drive
How to install games from Steam to an external drive
- Open Steam. In the menu, select Steam then Preferences
- In the Steam Settings window, select Storage
- Click the dropdown box to show already configured storage locations. If the drive is not in the list, select Add Drive.
- In the new window, navigate to the folder on the external drive that you want to use for Steam game installations, select the Folder, and select Open.
Adding an external drive as an installation location in Steam for macOS
Once this is set up, all you have to do is select the drive when you install the game.
Navigate to the game in the Library and click Install. Select the external drive as the target location, then click Install.
How to install games to an external drive manually
Due to the variety of installation methods, there’s no one specific way to do it. However, there are some general guidelines.
- For installers where you can set the install path, simply set the path to be one that uses the external drive.
- For installers where you drag the game to the Applications folder, you can instead drag it to a folder on the external drive instead.
- For games that have already been installed to the Applications folder, you can also drag it from the Applications folder to a folder on the external drive.
- The first time you run the application from the external drive will usually summon a macOS prompt to verify the application. Once this has been verified, it won’t appear again.
