How To INSTALL Mac Apps and Games to an EXTERNAL Drive!

if you saw my previous video on if the 256 gigabyte storage option is enough for macs you would know that it actually is for most people of course if you have the money upgrading to higher capacity storage options is great but let's face it most of us are struggling to even afford just the base model macbook air that doesn't really leave much room in the budget for storage upgrades not to mention if you wanted the two terabyte ssd version you would have to cough up 800 us dollars which is almost like buying a second macbook air the good news is that you can use an external drive to store a lot of extra data and even install apps and games to it it's actually pretty easy and in this video i'm going to show you exactly how now for the purposes of this video i'm using a two terabyte nvme ssd drive in an enclosure and i get around 900 megabytes per second read and write speeds which is super fast probably one of the fastest external storage options out there for the m1 max right now i will have another video on this channel going into this in more depth and showing you how to make one yourself as well as testing out some different nvme ssd enclosures to find the highest performing one anyway let's jump into the screen of my m1 macbook air with a 256 gigabyte ssd and i'll show you how to set up your external drive and start installing apps and games to it okay so the first thing you're going to want to do when you plug in your external drive to your computer for the first time is actually format it now you can see i've already formatted mine before this so it is popping up but yours is more than likely going to be formatted for windows so what we can do is we can come into disk utility open this up and we're going to select the external drive and we're going to erase it and we're going to give it whatever name you want i'm just going to call mine nvme just to make it easy and we're going to change this to apfs now this is obviously the apple file system and i do recommend using this if you're going to be using this drive to run games and apps off because it's a lot more compatible than some of these other formats here apfs is going to be the best one if you're going to be using this drive exclusively with your mac so we'll select apfs and we're going to hit arrays and we can see that has been successful there's no issues there at all so we're gonna hit done and now you can see that we have it appearing here we've got the full two terabytes free and it's an apfs volume so absolutely no issues now let's do a quick black magic disk speed test so you can see how quick this particular drive is now as i mentioned before it is quite speedy so let's see what speeds we can hit so as you can see there around 850 to 860 megabytes per second which is very very quick for reference my samsung t5 ssd is only about 330 megabytes per second so this is a lot faster so let's stop that now just quickly on the speeds you guys don't necessarily need a super fast drive but if you're going to be doing stuff like editing footage or doing a lot of transferring you do want something that's relatively quick at least over around 500 megabytes per second because if it's too slow it's going to take ages to transfer stuff and you're just not going to have a good experience now this is nowhere near as fast as the internal drive on the mac so let's actually try that out shall we so i've just selected the internal ssd on the mac and we'll see how this compares to the nvme drive i'm using so as you can see there that is pretty impressive it's over 2000 megabytes per second and the read speed is almost up to 3000 megabytes per second but again guys like you are really paying for this you are paying the apple tax in every sense of the word so it might not be the most cost effective upgrade for you guys so what we'll do now is we'll actually put some apps onto this external drive so let's open it up and you can see there it's completely empty there's nothing in it so let's actually put some apps in there now these are some apps that i've already installed now obviously you'd probably want to be doing the largest apps here you want to transfer those over but let's just say i don't use blender that often so all i can do is literally drag and drop it onto my nvme drive and then let's say for example i want to delete it off the internal hard drive on the mac and now if we close down applications let's just open up blender and we'll open up a recent file so let's do this one here and as you can see there that is working without any issues at all the app's working the animations working i can pan and tilt and this entire thing is running off my external drive so if we pause that and we come down here and we double click and we actually keep that in the dock if i now close blender and we won't save changes you can see it's still appearing on the dock and if i click it again that's just going to open up straight away and we can come back to the recent file and that will also load fine without any issues as well okay so what about games well again if you've installed games into your application folder you can literally just drag and drop them onto your external hard drive but if you're using steam it is a little bit different so let's first of all open up steam and what you want to do first of all is you want to come up here and click on steam you want to go preferences and then you want to go to your downloads section in the preferences content libraries and you want to click on steam library folders now inside here you want to add a library folder and you want to come down here and you want to select nvme and then you want to select new folder and let's just call that steam library and click ok and then we're going to click select and you can see now that has added a new steam game library on your mac which is on your nvme drive so if we click close and we click ok let's actually come here to a game and let's say for example we want to download shadow of the tomb raider we can click install and then we can actually select where we want to install this to so we can install it on the mac hard drive or we can install it to the nvme drive and we can click next and that is going to download and then install onto your external drive and then you'll be able to actually play this game on the external drive in the future i'll add a clip now of me actually playing shadow of the tomb raider on my macbook air using the nvme drive and you can see there there's absolutely no issues at all one thing i will mention is that nvme drives in particular can get quite hot and this particular drive certainly will get really hot if you're doing a lot of intense work like transferring hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of files in one go but for just simple things like editing footage or playing games there's going to be absolutely no issues at all and even if you are slamming it and it does get really hot and starts to heat up quite a bit you will obviously see a decrease in read and write speed but this particular drive is so quick it doesn't really matter you won't see much of a performance drop anyway guys that's it for this video hopefully you enjoyed it and hopefully you found it helpful if you do want to see that video on how i made a super super fast and super cheap 2 terabyte nvme ssd external drive stay tuned on my channel for that video but apart from that guys thank you for watching and i will catch you in the next one

Channel: Created Tech

Views: 78,738

Keywords: apple, 256gb, how much storage do I need mac, 256 vs 512, do I need more storage mac, upgrade storage mac, is 256gb enough storage, is 256 gb enough, external drive mac, ssd mac, samsung t5, m1 editing video on external ssd, usb c hub, mac hub, mac dock, more usb ports mac, expand storage, expand storage mac, usb c hub mac, can i install programs external drive mac, install games external drive mac, mac external drive, run games external drive mac, run mac external drive

Id: Dq-Wc7su0YY

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020