installing skyrim on external ssd

[anjenthedog]

I posted this over on Nexus but got only 1 reponse...so I'm re-posting here in the hopes of getting a bit more advise (probably should have just done that in the first place, but to be fair, the one reply I got there did offer some useful info/food-for-thought)

 

I used to run Skyrim SE on my (C:) root drive (500G SSD)  but a Steam crash and obtuse "support" from both Steam and Vortex left me inoperable for the past few months.

 

I just ordered an external SSD that I'm hoping to use for both Skyrim AE/SE, and ideally Vortex too, once it arrives (supposedly Feb 1),  to pull as much of the storage load from my root drive as I can (vortex has quite a storage footprint all on its own from all the download files it stores).

 

I'm looking for any important tips I need to be aware of to pull this external drive thing off with a minimum of pain. 

 

Note: this will be a reinstall, not a salvage operation, ftr, fwiw (I will likely pull some resources over from the archived, game contents:  presets, texture/mesh, ini settings, etc, but I'm not trying to revive/fix the old game, just so we're on the same page.)

 

Edited January 29, 2025 by anjenthedog
added a little context in the first sentence

[traison]

Lets hope its at least USB 3.2 then. Pulling 100GiB+ of big-titty textures out of anything less than that might take a while.

 

I think if this external drive is going to be connected regularily or for long periods, I'd allocate another drive letter for it other than what Windows gives it by default; say, X for instance. Personally I'd like to avoid the situation where I have another usb device connected when connecting the game drive, only to find out it was given the E drive letter and now MO2 can't find the game anymore and all your shortcuts are broken. Also, X is more gamer than D, everyone knows that.

 

Edit: Some proof for the "it may not be what it claims to be" statement above. For future Googling people that think I'm just being paranoid.

Edited February 8, 2025 by traison

[Demonwise]

1 hour ago, traison said:

Lets hope its at least USB 3.2 then. Pulling 100GiB+ of big-titty textures out of anything less than that might take a while.

 

This is good advice. Do this. 

 

Also...

 

The viability of using an external drive install will depend heavily upon what mods your going to use. If you plan on going very light on any texture or mesh mods then it should be fine. That said, if you are going to use ENB and run 4K world and environmental textures along side character, weapon and armor textures then it will take a very long time to load the game off the external drive. At worst, I think your just going to run into long load times but, in theory, as soon as the game loads all the assets off the drive then you should have smooth gameplay until you have to transition to a new area that requires loading. But... there are a lot of world transitions. Basically any transition between outside to inside and vice versa will require loading. Ultimately there is no way to tell how good or bad it will be until you do the install and install your mods. I would suggest you start light though on the texture mods and test in-game load times before you go adding more and more and more. 

[anjenthedog]

20 hours ago, traison said:

Lets hope its at least USB 3.2 then. Pulling 100GiB+ of big-titty textures out of anything less than that might take a while.

 

I think if this external drive is going to be connected regularily or for long periods, I'd allocate another drive letter for it other than what Windows gives it by default; say, X for instance. Personally I'd like to avoid the situation where I have another usb device connected when connecting the game drive, only to find out it was given the E drive letter and now MO2 can't find the game anymore and all your shortcuts are broken. Also, X is more gamer than D, everyone knows that.

It is. 2TB USB 3.2 I knew that much anyway

 

oh PS> even though it's an external drive, it will be used as a defacto permanent drive. No unplugging. I have another external drive (5TB normal HD) that operates in the same manner (used for file archiving). And yes, new drives... I assign drive letters, not system (have faced similar issues in the past, although not with games)

Edited January 30, 2025 by anjenthedog
more detail

[anjenthedog]

18 hours ago, Demonwise said:

 

This is good advice. Do this. 

 

Also...

 

The viability of using an external drive install will depend heavily upon what mods your going to use. If you plan on going very light on any texture or mesh mods then it should be fine. That said, if you are going to use ENB and run 4K world and environmental textures along side character, weapon and armor textures then it will take a very long time to load the game off the external drive. At worst, I think your just going to run into long load times but, in theory, as soon as the game loads all the assets off the drive then you should have smooth gameplay until you have to transition to a new area that requires loading. But... there are a lot of world transitions. Basically any transition between outside to inside and vice versa will require loading. Ultimately there is no way to tell how good or bad it will be until you do the install and install your mods. I would suggest you start light though on the texture mods and test in-game load times before you go adding more and more and more. 

No 4K textures (waste anyway considering my card, a 1060C 6G) and no on ENB. I prefer the (community shaders + a few choice mods like real clouds) route, due to my 'limp' video card limitations.

 

was a aware to some degree re: load times I can deal with longer load times (I think, I hope). Good suggestion re: light on textures at first.  (Textures are my Achilles heal... I love how they look (higher res) even when they slowed down Skyrim loading and caused some problems in-game via load)

 

fwiw, drive is a USB 3.2, 2TB Samsung with "up to 2K" throughput, much faster (specs) than my 500G (also a samsung) *internally installed root drive's transfer speed actually.

Edited January 30, 2025 by anjenthedog
more details

[traison]

Don't mean to be a Debbie Downer here but the hidden meaning behind my "lets hope its 3.2" comment was that its annoyingly common for companies to claim something on the box then ship something completely different. It also doesn't help that there's a million different USB 3 "sub-standards" now. This is something you only really find out for real in honest reviews (know of any??) and by testing it yourself (i.e. when its already too late).

 

44 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

with "up to 2K" throughput

 

This for instance sounds suspicious as hell. 2K video? What bitrate? 8000 Kbps which I find quite decent for 1440p which is larger than 2K would mean the drive is only pushing 8 Mbps or less. That's far from the 3.2 advertized standard speed of 3.2 Gbps (at the very lowest end). We're talking 400 times slower.

Edited January 30, 2025 by traison

[belegost]

If Vortex, why not use external drive for download and staging and have game on regular C drive?

 

What it could achieve is: faster installation (external to external), slower deployment (external to C:) and fast loading in game (internal C:).

 

Vortex is a space hog only because it effectively stores two copies of an uncompressed mod files: one in staging folder where it keeps it as a "base", and another in the game folder itself where it deploys and overwrites with whatever rules you have in place. Plus a compressed file in downloads, but this may or may not get removed after first install, depending on your settings.

 

It would save you all the issues associated with Steam game (assuming you do use Steam version), not being in default Steam folder and Steam itself not being in Program Files, but allow to save a lot of space with modding.

 

I have not tested this method myself but I had been using Vortex for years, consider myself a power user and unless there's something obvious I'm missing, I can't see why it wouldn't work. Of course, all the rules about external drive letter being constant still apply.

Edited January 31, 2025 by belegost

[traison]

2 hours ago, belegost said:

If Vortex, why not use external drive for download and staging and have game on regular C drive?

 

What it could achieve is: faster installation (external to external), slower deployment (external to C:) and fast loading in game (internal C:).

 

If I understand this correctly, you're suggesting having mod installs on a separate physical drive than the game itself. This is technically not possible when you're using NTFS hardlinking (i.e. how Vortex installs mods). I don't think that can even cross boundaries between partitions on the same physical device, but I could be wrong on that one, been ages since I tested that.

 

Its possible Vortex can get around this, but it would have to actually copy mod files to the other drive/partition. This would be quite slow indeed like you suggested.

 

2 hours ago, belegost said:

Vortex is a space hog only because it effectively stores two copies of an uncompressed mod files: one in staging folder where it keeps it as a "base", and another in the game folder itself where it deploys and overwrites with whatever rules you have in place.

 

It looks like that yes because NTFS hardlinks are literally files. A regular file is a hardlink with a link count of 1. You can have 1 or more hardlinks pointing to the same data. So basically what you could see is this:

 

C:\Some\Path\To\MyFile.bmp   4 MiB

C:\Another\Path\To\MyFile.bmp   4 MiB

 

These could be both hardlinks to the same data, meaning on the physical disk these seemingly 2 files use up 4 MiB, and the data is marked as having 2 links. When the link count reaches 0, the data is deleted, or at least marked as "can overwrite".

 

The handy, and sometimes disasterous, feature of having the same file hardlinked in multiple places is that if you edit the contents of one file its also going to change the other: it's the same data afterall. MO2 is in some sense no different from this, you edit a file in Data using a program running under the USVFS and you also end up editing the source file. In MO2 however there is no link, its the API calls that get redirected. It's just going to look like you're editing a different file, but internally its re-routed.

 

In theory, if you hardlinked a large file, say 50 GiB 10 times on a 250 GiB drive, you could make it look like you had 500 GiB of data on a 250 GiB drive. In reality only one fifth of the drive is in use and Windows would also report this in the drive properties.

 

2 hours ago, belegost said:

I have not tested this method myself but I had been using Vortex for years, consider myself a power user and unless there's something obvious I'm missing, I can't see why it wouldn't work.

 

I wouldn't call it obvious, I can totally see how this can be overlooked. Here's a utility from Sysinternals (Microsoft) which can view these links. One thing to keep in mind here however is that if a program deletes a file that was deployed by Vortex, and create a new file with the same name in its place, that file is going to look and behave exactly the same way as before except that:

1. It may prevent Vortex from deploying the original mod file.
2. You now have a "rogue" file in your Skyrim install directory.
3. Editing the file will not edit the other linked file in the source mod.

[belegost]

31 minutes ago, traison said:

Its possible Vortex can get around this, but it would have to actually copy mod files to the other drive/partition.

It has "Move deployment" as an option. Marked as experimental though, but I guess it could be used to that extent.

 

31 minutes ago, traison said:

It looks like that yes because NTFS hardlinks are literally files. A regular file is a hardlink with a link count of 1. You can have 1 or more hardlinks pointing to the same data. So basically what you could see is this:

 

C:\Some\Path\To\MyFile.bmp   4 MiB

C:\Another\Path\To\MyFile.bmp   4 MiB

 

These could be both hardlinks to the same data, meaning on the physical disk these seemingly 2 files use up 4 MiB, and the data is marked as having 2 links. When the link count reaches 0, the data is deleted, or at least marked as "can overwrite".

 

The handy, and sometimes disasterous, feature of having the same file hardlinked in multiple places is that if you edit the contents of one file its also going to change the other: it's the same data afterall. MO2 is in some sense no different from this, you edit a file in Data using a program running under the USVFS and you also end up editing the source file. In MO2 however there is no link, its the API calls that get redirected. It's just going to look like you're editing a different file, but internally its re-routed.

 

In theory, if you hardlinked a large file, say 50 GiB 10 times on a 250 GiB drive, you could make it look like you had 500 GiB of data on a 250 GiB drive. In reality only one fifth of the drive is in use and Windows would also report this in the drive properties.

 

I am not going to claim I understood most of what you said. but I guess there's only one way to find out.

But I'm not really certain if that entirely works as you described - see the next quoted reply.

 

OP. feeling like volunteering up for a guinea pig position?

 

31 minutes ago, traison said:

One thing to keep in mind here however is that if a program deletes a file that was deployed by Vortex, and create a new file with the same name in its place, that file is going to look and behave exactly the same way as before except that:

1. It may prevent Vortex from deploying the original mod file.
2. You now have a "rogue" file in your Skyrim install directory.
3. Editing the file will not edit the other linked file in the source mod.

 

Vortex is actually smart enough to detect if a file has been modified, and will prompt at the next deployment, giving a number of options to proceed. Delete the modified file, restore the modified file, keep the modified file or keep the file and apply the change to staging folder as well.

With that in mid, I'm not certain if what you said about it being the same file is true. But then again, I am probably wrong. This techpriest technobabble is well above my comprehension.

 

Praise the Omnissiah.

Edited January 31, 2025 by belegost

[anjenthedog]

On 1/30/2025 at 10:29 AM, traison said:

Don't mean to be a Debbie Downer here but the hidden meaning behind my "lets hope its 3.2" comment was that its annoyingly common for companies to claim something on the box then ship something completely different. It also doesn't help that there's a million different USB 3 "sub-standards" now. This is something you only really find out for real in honest reviews (know of any??) and by testing it yourself (i.e. when its already too late).

 

 

This for instance sounds suspicious as hell. 2K video? What bitrate? 8000 Kbps which I find quite decent for 1440p which is larger than 2K would mean the drive is only pushing 8 Mbps or less. That's far from the 3.2 advertized standard speed of 3.2 Gbps (at the very lowest end). We're talking 400 times slower.

yah I'm aware. file transfer speed (max, ie under ideal circumstance of course): spec is: (R/W, up to, in MB/s) 2000/2000. I'll cope., or I'll learn to cope.

 

[anjenthedog]

13 hours ago, belegost said:

OP. feeling like volunteering up for a guinea pig position?

Well ... with all due respect, no, not right now anyway. Just trying to get a working game back up with the least issues and least troubleshooting sessions.  And as to using the C drive again for the game (or even for vortex), I'd really like to keep the C drive off limits from now on... Once bitten twice shy and all that.

 

idk we'll see how it goes. 

[belegost]

T'was but a jest.