Hello everyone!
I Have been playing a lot of the Sims 1 and 2, and I had some experience with Sims 3, but I got discouraged by the system requirements and the long loading times. But now, many hardware's later, I wish to play with it again (might even make a Youtube series about it), but before installation, I have a couple of questions. I will install most of the expansion packs which actually adds to the gameplay and I try to avoid the stuff packs.
My first concern is that the game as I noticed, places many things inside the documents folder. Now I have a dedicated SSD drive for my operating system, and I have been warned about it's limited write/rewrite-ability, so I wish to make those files installed to a different partition. Any ideas about that?
Also I'm looking for a good all around region with most of the rabbit holes, community buildings/places, low population and many empty lots to play around with. My problem is that as I read through the description of these, they all seem to be made around one or a couple of expansion packs. I'm looking for something that works well with all of them, if there's any (ok, I can live without a big city part, but I'm not sure if it's needed by Showtime and Late nighs). Any suggestions?
The last one is basically just what do you guys consider as must have things? I mean mods, tools besides the commercial releases. Especially things that would make the game run smoother if there's any.
That is all, thanks for reading it! ^^

For mods: http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Update+History

Get his Overwatch mod, it will keep your game running smoothly. Storyprogression is amazing too, I wouldn't be playing this game any longer without that. Master Controller is useful for getting sims to do what you want and for fixing bugs. ErrorTrap is important to have as well. Personally, I have pretty much all of his mods, and will not play the game without them. They make the game run better, and allow you to tweak the neighborhoods to run as YOU want them to. Some of them might be a little complicated for a new player, but that's okay.

Just reiterating how amazing the Nraas suite of mods is. Might also want to check out Awesomemod, read through the configuration settings to see if it's something you'd be interested in. Mostly it fixes annoying stuff that the game does.

I agree fully. Without Twallan's mods - in minimum Overwatch + StoryProgression - the game is pretty much unplayable.

Thank you guys, you are awesome! ^^
I'll install Twallan's mods. Also after some googling I managed to relocate my documents folder (Sorry! ><). Now only to find a decent map to play in...
Update:
Installed overwatch, master controller and story progression, last one with all it's sub mod. Region still loads very slowly... but than again, it's a first run, does it have anything to do with it?
Update 2:
Got rid of story progression, world loading time is about 4-5 mins, as I googled around, it seems that is the average. Character creator and household load times both under a min, but the character creator reacts slowly to changes (1-4 sec). I guess this is the best I can bring out from this game.