I have a 2017 MacBook Pro with a pretty small amount of space, recently I’ve found wow takes up too much. Until I can replace the laptop with something better I’m going to have to switch to using a 1TB external ssd drive to store the game on. I do have 3.0 USB ports so that should help a bit. I am wondering how badly this will affect the games overall performance.
There are, according to Mactracker, two 13-inch 2017 MacBook Pro models, one with two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and one with four. The 15-inch model has four. In any case, if you have a free Thunderbolt 3 port, and can afford a Thunderbolt enclosure for an M.2 NVME SSD, you should be able to achieve a good fraction of the 40 Gbit/s bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3. With the USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, however, the limit is 10 Gbit/s.
Unfortunately, I can’t find any specs online for the bandwidth of Apple’s internal SSD hardware for those models, so I can’t really offer any advice on which (if either) of these options (Thunderbolt vs. USB) compares with internal storage for WoW play.
If you have money burning a hole in your pocket and your MBP is one of those without the Touch Bar, it is (or at least was 3 years ago) possible to replace the internal flash memory with a larger capacity card (search the Interwebs for everymac and “How to Upgrade 13-Inch non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro SSD” (sorry, can’t include links here).
On the third hand, if you have $600 for a 1 Tbyte upgrade, you might instead think about putting that toward an Apple Silicon machine with (a lot) more internal storage.
The above is free advice, worth every penny.
I use a Mac Mini with an external Thunderbolt SSD and it plays just fine – better, I think, than the internal drive because I’ve got a faster SSD. I’d consider Other World Computing’s small external NVMe chassis and a good Intel or Samsung drive, and as long as your MBP has Thunderbolt you should be happy.
I play on a M2 Mac mini and have the game installed on an External USB SSD connected by USB-C and it plays just as good as it did when it was installed on the internal storage.
Anyone still looking into an external drive should also format the drive as HFS+ if they’re able to. While you can’t do that with internal drives, external drives should still be able to use that format, and it will be much, much speedier than APFS when combined with the CASC system Blizzard’s games use.