Steam has a move function built into the library settings. You can also just copy the files, tell steam you want to install the game, and then select the folder where the files are, and it will “discover” rather then download them.
Probably need to be USB 3.2 Gen 2 (Blue USB-A or USB-C).
And some games require the drive be formatted in the operating system’s preferred high-performance filesystem, rather some variant of FAT.
I think that’s still much, much slower (2.5 GB/sec) than a fast SSD (maybe 10 GB/sec or faster). Good enough for slower drives, though.
The sources I read say that Gen2 is 10 gigabits per second. On the same order of magnitude as SATA3
Gen 3 2x2 is 20 gigabits per second (2.5 gigabytes/sec), but that’s much slower than the 14+ gigabytes per second of PCIE 5. SATA is pretty obsolete now for (gaming and high performance) SSDs.
I mean, it’s not the end of the world, as @Disinfectus shows. Just adds a few more seconds to startup and level loads.
But if you don’t have too many games (or don’t mind downloading and swapping them out), the internal NVMe drives are much much faster. Not orders of magnitude faster, but still way bigger of a difference than, say, the recent measly increases between graphics card generations.
Interesting. I have yet to run into that. Granted, I’m not exactly playing the latest and greatest games, but something like Red Dead Redemption 2 is completely playable off of my external drive.
Having said that, since I have a more powerful GPU now, I decided to download the enhanced version of GTA 5. That one I put on the SSD.