Install and play games on Steam solely from an External Drive? [duplicate]

I want to save some space on my SSD and have Steam and its games stored on an external drive.

Is it possible to install Steam and its games on an external drive ? Will some of the installation files be stored on my SSD ? Will games run sufficiently fast when played from the external drive ?

Solution 1:

When you come to install Steam, you should get a choice of where to install it, under custom installation if I remember correctly. If not, steam isn't massive anyway.

When you come to install games, you can choose a Steam library to install to. The default is the %\steamapps folder within the steam installation directory. You can choose to use a different folder with each game:

Note: I already had a steam library on my HDD but it was straight forward to create a new one.