Inventor on External Harddrive

[jlafond1]

Hello,

Will Inventor Professional work if intalled on an external USB or wireless harddrive?  Would it work if installed on an external SD card?  

As is the program is really bogging down every aspect of my computer, and since I dont use it every day, I'd like to store it and run it from an external source one or all of these external sources.

[pendean]

Not an option.

[NathanLos]

Hi jlafond1,

When you say "bogging down," are you referring to an issue with speed, or storage requirements, or something else? Perhaps there is a way to minimize the impact and still enable you to install to the main drive.

What are the specs of your computer?

Thanks,

Nathan

Autodesk Inventor Platform Team

[jlafond1]

Not an option because it wouldn't run properly, or because Autodesk prevents it from being an option during download and instalation?

It boggs down the speed, especially at startup.  I have tweeked startup using msconfig and it helped, but not as much as I would like it to be.

I have an 8 core Intel i7 2.20 GHz with 6GB ram and an NVIDIA GeForce video card.  The computer can handle running the porgram very well, but the start up time sucks, and I dont use Inventor often enough to leave it slowing everything down all the time.

[NathanLos]

This sounds like a case of "it might work in an unsupported manner" vs. "it's not going to work at all". I was not able to locate a definitive statement one way or the other after searching autodesk.com. Certainly, a lot more validation and real-world usage occurs with internal drives. Everyone's situation is different, but it's something to keep in mind if you're using the software in a production environment.

One aspect of the installation that might cause a problem is the licensing. It tries to activate the software on a specific computer, and an external drive makes that more difficult to do. I'm not saying that this would necessarily cause a problem, just that it's a potential issue.

Inventor really shouldn't be doing too much during system startup. Off the top of my head, the things that run are Application Manager, caching a few files, and loading the iProperties extension into Windows Explorer. Somewhere in the neighborhood of tens of MB of memory and a couple of seconds.

Immediately following an installation, some system tools might be running. For instance, a virus scanner or search indexing service might need to check each Inventor file that was installed, but this should be a one-time cost. Maybe there is an external reason for the slowdown, like trying to re-establish connections to network drives that are no longer available. If you find out more details, please post back to the forum. I'd be interested in learning what you discover. Thanks.

[caritagrNEFX4]

So i'm thinking of trying to install Inventor on a external SSD, using a USB 3.0. Do you think this is possible?

[TravisNave]

It's probably possible but not practical. It would be slower than your bus
speed. And it would not be portable if you planned on moving it to another
computer. It probably would not give you a very good experience if you got
it to work.

[Mark.Lancaster]

@caritagrNEFX4

Welcome to the community

When I see these types of request.. I always wonder why you or an end user what to do something like this..  Doesn't make sense to put a 3D modeling software on an external hard drive..  Why do you want to impact its performance?  Why can't you just install it on a normal hard drive?

[DarrenP]

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@caritagrNEFX4 wrote:

So i'm thinking of trying to install Inventor on a external SSD, using a USB 3.0. Do you think this is possible?

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whats the reason for this?

like what was said above Inventor isn't a portable program to run inventor the external drive has to be connected to the computer at all times

[pendean]

So you think you can just walk around with the external drive, plug into any computer, and the software will work? Sorry, not that one. A PC installation is required.

If you are out of room you need a new harddrive or a new PC otherwise. Good luck.