Quote Originally Posted by Athael_Elluvien View Post
The Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Laptops exist in several variations of their specs, so a model number and a device name won't help much.

I moved the game from the OS SSD because I need the free space there. That's why I got me an external SSD in the first place. Also, according to googled comments from other players on different forum platforms FF14 does run on an external SSD and HDD without problems.

And I will for sure not crack open my new SSD to build it into my laptop for having less safe space at the end. Why would I trade 3 drives in exchange for 2 overall?
AN515-54-5812 right?
So, it has a NVMe for the OS drive, I suggest upgrading that to 500gb or better (whatever in your price range, average price is just under $50US for good ones, I use CT500P2SSD8 in a lot of the systems I build)

And, as I said, yes, you can in theory run F14 from an external drive, but as you are experiencing, it is not always a sure thing and FF14 is known to have issues when not ran on the OS drive in some cases.
If you want to continue trying, I suggest going through the laptops power management for the USB port and make sure nothing is set to throttle them down or turn them off to save battery power. Also, make sure you are on AC power (the charge brick) when using the laptop to game and with the external drive. Double check the specific port you are using it one rated with enough power to run the external drive, check with the manufacturer documents for your exact model on both the laptop and drive (the model number is on the bottom of the laptop).

As for upgrading the secondary drive with the SSD out of the external drive, that was just a suggestion to allow you to use the better SSD in place of the secondary hard drive (HDD), as the increase of speed due to not having to wait for the HD to spin up makes a huge difference in read/write speeds.... it would basically be a zero net cost upgrade, as you have already purchased the external drive.
It's not a matter of just "trade 3 drives in exchange for 2 overall" as the end result would be a "faster" laptop.... plus nothing is stopping you from putting the old HDD into the external drive shell afterwards.