Question on running PC program (TransDEM) from Ext HDD

[sp9813]

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[JCitron]

That is a bit tight on space, and the problem you are seeing is just that running out of room to do the swapping and memory paging operations. This will affect your machine performance overall so you may want to consider this if possible.

You can run applications from external drives, however, that may come with a performance hint due to USB being much slower than SATA. If your machine supports E-SATA (External- SATA) drives, you can then use those with little or no performance hit. If your system supports the new Thunderbolt interface, you maybe even better off since that is supposedly faster still. I have not used them to know if this is true or not, just read about the interface.

With TransDEM, you can specify a different location, such as your external drive to hold your data and keep the application on the smaller internal drive, however, you do need a bigger internal drive if you can do that. I currently have my TransDEM Data, which includes the downloaded DEMs, projects, and exported routes on a separate drive away from my much smaller SSD which holds only my programs and OS.

John

 

[wilts747]

I would have thought from a cost perspective as already suggested upgrading your hard-drive to a larger one would be a more favorable solution. Hybrid drives are not that more expensive than standard drives if the finances don't stretch to full SSD and provide an effective halfway house and a hard-drive performance boost with their solid state front end. There are many good and free utilities available to assist cloning or imaging the drive for transfer. I use Aomei Backupper.

If you are not keen on replacing the current drive, Icedock now produce a caddie assembly to replace a laptops CD/DVD drive, you would loose the optical drive which fewer are using these days but gain access to the SATA bus. Details: http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=213 Peter

 

[PC_Ace]

Absolutely concur with the opinions expressed above relating to suggesting replacement of the small internal Hard Disk Drive as the first and most desirable consideration.
Running apps from an external hard drive will have issues due to throughput bottlenecks over a USB, especially if limited to USB 2.0 speeds. It is do-able, however, especially over USB 3.0 or better.
A cheap internal 256Gb SSD for your OS and applications/ program files coupled with an external USB drive for your data will resolve your problems immediately of course.