NI taking too much disk space! Move to external hard drive?

[smartmystery]

So, I'm a student and basically don't know much about NI and LabVIEW. But I noticed that it takes up a lot of disk space(10GB of NIFPGA and 9GB in my 32-bit program files, it takes little on the 64-bit one) on my laptop (it has only 250GB). And I was wondering how to "transfer" the files to my external hard drive? Or do I have to uninstall and re-install the program? Help would be appreciated.

EDIT: Takes around 9.7GB more in the program data, which is a total of around 30GB.

[Blokk · Accepted solution]

You might do some tricks and manually move installed software under Windows. But it is really not recommended, since it can cause LOTS of issues!

The best advise is to uninstall and reinstall the program. However, if you install it on an external HDD, it might slow things down. But this depends on the interface you want to use (USB3.0 versus 2.0, etc).

I have also 250 GB solid state drive in my laptop, but it is just enough for all my software. My trick is that, I store large data files in a HDD which is in the DVD bay. Nowadays I (almost) never need to use CD/DVDs, so I have a removable DVD bay slot in my laptop.

So I would store large data files on a second HDD, and use the internal HDD/SSD for installed programs exclusively...

edit: if you can afford, just buy a 500GB SSD and replace the internal disk in your laptop. No more worry about free space at normal use...

[Yamaeda]

I have 5 versions installed on my laptop to be able to run different customers systems, and 2 more on virtual machines.  ^^

/Y

[Blokk]

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@Yamaeda wrote:

I have 5 versions installed on my laptop to be able to run different customers systems, and 2 more on virtual machines.  ^^

/Y

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Good, but how does this address the OP's original question about migrating NI software?

[crossrulz]

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@smartmystery wrote:

(10GB of NIFPGA and 9GB in my 32-bit program files, it takes little on the 64-bit one)

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The NI FPGA is almost entirely the Xilinx FPGA compiler.  If you are not using LabVIEW FPGA, then uninstall it.  I yell at people all the time for installing EVERYTHING and then they complain about not having hard drive space.  Install only the tools and toolkits you need.  NI has A LOT of tools, most of which you likely will not touch.  If you are unsure about which tools you need, have a nice sit down with your professor and figure it out.

[JensG69]

And even is you need FPGA: if you use the FPGA Cloud Compile Service you could also omit installing the FPGA compiler, again saving you about 10 Gig.

Regards, Jens