Running UE4 on an External Hard Drive—Is It a Problem?

Development Getting Started & Setup
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In the interest of saving space on my older MacBook Pro, I installed UE4 on an external HD with plenty of room on it. When I launched UE4, it told me I was running the engine on “insufficient hardware” that didn’t meet the minimum requirements and would be subject to crashing and errors. I was able to get into UE4, but it took an incredibly long time to load (shaders, in particular) and it doesn’t seem as responsive or as stable as it should.

I’m confused because I’m running the latest MacOS and the guts of my MacBook meet the requirements, even though my built-in HD is almost full. Does UE4 think that my external HD is the hardware that it’s trying to run on? Would I see an improvement if I installed UE4 on my built-in HD? I don’t want to risk getting deep into my learning and having the program freeze and crash on me.

Would appreciate your insights and advice. Thanks in advance.

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It really depends on you specs. You’ll need quad core i5 and an NVIDIA 900 series ( or similar ), minimum.

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So it doesn’t matter where the software is installed?

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The program has to load into memory to run, so it doesn’t matter ( as long as it’s not a really slow HDD ).

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I have found that when opening projects for the first time a large number of shaders need to be compiled. I have an older PC and it has taken two to three hours to open a file. After saving, the file opens much faster. I have learned to be patient and that I need a more powerful PC. :money_mouth_face: