DIY: PORTABLE STEAM GAME DRIVE!

Karaliene • 2025

A portable steam game drive allows you to store your steam games on a removable drive and easily switch between pc/laptops without needing to reinstall! Super helpful if you have a slow internet connection or a small internal drive capacity and you couldn’t be bothered to upgrade.

This is how we are able to simultaneously benchmark our gaming laptops without waiting for hours on downloads and hoarding all the office bandwidth.

What you need:

A portable storage drive, could be a thumbdrive, an hdd, a sata ssd or an M.2, anything works but the faster the better! And of course, your PC that has your steam games.

Step 1. Add your portable drive to your Steam storages.

Connect your drive on your fastest USB port (USB A 3.2 Gen 2 or USB C Thunderbolt 4) then open your Steam. 

Go to settings, select Storage, open the drop down menu for storage, and click Add Drive.

Open the drop down menu, select your portable drive, and hit Add. PS: you can change your drives letter first on disk management to avoid getting confused if your pc has multiple disk drives

You can now select your portable drive as your Steam storage!

Step 2. Transferring/Adding games on your portable drive

To transfer your games, go to your Library, right click on a game you want to transfer and select Properties.

Select Installed Files, click Move Installed Files, then select the portable drive on the drop down.

Wait for the file to finish transferring, repeat this process on other games  and you’re done! Note that transfer speeds vary depending on your drive’s read and write speed. 

You may also install games directly on the portable game drive.

Step 3. Connecting you portable game drive to another pc/laptop

Connect your portable game drive on your second device and repeat Step 1. 

Steam will automatically add the games on the portable drive to your second device’s library. You can now start playing!

Loading your game off an external drive should not affect the game’s performance but boot time will depend on your drive’s speed!