The Sims 4

Guys HELP :'( 

I love playing the sims 4, but I have a cheap laptop, so my storage is like NOTHING. And I love my mods, BUT I ALWAYS RUN OUT OF ROOM. I bought a hard drive thingy so I could move my game there and download how every many mods I want cause the storage on that thing is HUGE. BUT GET THIS. I've followed a gazillion tutorials and have tried so many different things and I still can't get it to work :( I always end up losing all my sims or somehow the game itself wont load up. I literally just wanna play the sims with heavy mods</3 I've done this like close to 8 times spending at the least 6 or more hours trying to figure it out and have lost so many sims and hours of work from corrupted and/or deleted files and stuff, it's such a pain in the but and I literally don't know what to do anymore. Any tips? I'd appreciate ANYTHING. I'm desperate to play again!

Sigh, xoxo -MikeyWayLuver