Question on external hard drive

[Anonymous]

Hi, i'm running low on storage on my laptop, so i want to use my production software, so can i use it with my external hard drive? good feedbacks are appreciated.

[mdavis22569]

 So Inventor itself must be installed and ran on the OS drive.

I have my working folder on my other external hard drives:

Can you tell me if you have anything in your C:\Autodesk folder?

I would also clean out your %temp% folder too ....

[johnsonshiue · Accepted solution]

Hi! Are you trying to run Inventor on different machines? If yes, such portable ability is not yet available. Inventor Pro can be considered a very big program (about 20 million lines of code) requiring decent hardware to run smoothly. Even if it ran on an external harddrive, the performance would be greatly reduced and it would not be usable. Also, Inventor needs to leverage system temp folder to store certain temporary files during some operations.

If I were you, I would free up as much as system storage space. And, I would go to File Explorer -> %temp% -> delete most of the files there and clean up Recycle Bin.

Many thanks!

[mdavis22569]

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@johnsonshiue wrote:

If yes, such portable ability is not yet available.

hmmmmm, tell me more

Mike

(kidding)

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Mike,

There is no secret here. We are indeed working on making Inventor install easier and quicker. Also, Inventor Beta users can already use a browser to run Inventor Beta builds without install. Whether or not these offerings will be made public in commercial releases is not something I can dictate. But, the technology is indeed available.

Many thanks!

[mdavis22569]

I was kidding ...

I remember back in the day there was a dongle / USB someone had for software ...

I won't say anything beta, outside of I like everything I see .. 

[kelly.young]

Hello @Anonymous I see that you are visiting as a new member to the Inventor Forum.
Welcome to the Autodesk Community!

You should be able to use an external hard drive or network hard drive locations, many users do, I know I have successfully.

It really depends on how much you need to collaborate with other users and if you are going to utilize Vault or not. Either way you can always share or move files easily with Pack & Go. 

If you have a specific instance where this isn't working or are trying to save to a limited access drive or cloud location that would be helpful in finding the best solution. 

Please select the Accept as Solution button if a post solves your issue or answers your question.

[leowarren34 · Accepted solution]

It's possible but not pretty as you'll end up making a system specific drive as references are needed to temp folders etc,

personally only use external drives for backups or work files and get a larger drive, if a pc likely no probs, if a laptop sometimes you can remove the CD drive if you still have one...

I have internal ssd which i use externally and works a treat for my machine but is it worth it?