My sons PC is ready for the Pro 2012 upgrade in a couple of days. This time around we are going to put the runtime folder on an external hard drive, and I have some questions before I mess that up.

Should I set up a folder called "poser" on the hard drive for the new runtime folder, or is it better to let Poser do all that when installing? Also, is there a way to stop the external hard drive name letters from changing? I have three external USB drives and occasionally the drive letters change, and I know that will cause problems down the road.

Anything else I should be aware of with external runtime? Please let me know so I am armed in advance. A few nuggets of information are worth more than a mountain of ignorance.

You might have major problems if your external drives keep changing designations.  There is a way to anchor those designations in your OS settings to prevent unwanted changes, but without further OS information, we don't know where to start.  You may want to consider creating several runtimes to separate content; large files on a USB line feed may slow down drive access, but hopefully not crash Poser.

As your sons' PC is new, I would guess that It's got a decent size HDD. Have you thought about creating a Partition for your Poser Runtimes? I did and it saves a lot of time doing Backups and Defrags.

My suggestion, the Poser installation on the PC's HD and all the other external runtimes on the external HD. New USB 3.0 makes external HD's nearly as fast as internal HD's.

Unless you have a solid Windows admin background, I would highly discourage you deviate in anyway from the standard installation. You can override the default installation location during the install of course, but if you are thinking about moving runtimes around after install, you are just asking for trouble. Windows expects things to stay where they are put during install. This is not Linux, Unix or MAC OS - this is Windows, and Windows is not forgiving. The Windows registery records all sorts of install information, including file path locations of binaries. So if you change up things such that the registery info is not in synch with where it thinks things should be, you can very easily corrupt the installation and the software will not work at all.

If you are concerned about drive space, you could during install, tell it to install the software to your external drive, but this also is risky unless the external drive is always connected to the PC and the Drive Letter assigned to it does not ever change. Windows often loads pieces of various software during boot up. If Windows can't find these pieces because the drive is not attached or is not associated to the drive letter as it expects (the registery has this info), then it is possible Windows may not even start up correctly and you might have to reinstall Windows.  

The other thing to consider is the speed of the drive and how you connect it to the PC - Poser and other IO intensive software need ability to read and write to disk fast. If you connect an external SATA drive to the PC via an eSATA connection, no worries since the speed communicating to the drive is the same as if it was an internal. On the other hand, if the external drive is connected via USB 2.0, the communication speed to the drive will be MUCH slower compared to if the drive was internal and may negatively affect performance of your program during read/write operations.  Firewire is considerably faster than USB, but still is not at bus speed which an internal drive would operate.  So, if you can, it is best to install render intensive software on internal drives, or via eSata external. It is highly discouraged to use external USB drives for this purpose. They make good places to store backups, documents, photos, music, and perhaps video. They are not good for applications where decent IO rates are needed.

Quote - My sons PC is ready for the Pro 2012 upgrade in a couple of days. This time around we are going to put the runtime folder on an external hard drive, and I have some questions before I mess that up.

Should I set up a folder called "poser" on the hard drive for the new runtime folder, or is it better to let Poser do all that when installing? Also, is there a way to stop the external hard drive name letters from changing? I have three external USB drives and occasionally the drive letters change, and I know that will cause problems down the road.

Anything else I should be aware of with external runtime? Please let me know so I am armed in advance. A few nuggets of information are worth more than a mountain of ignorance.

I would add...

I would either upgrade to a larger drive (you can get 2T and 3T 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s internal drives for under $200 now) or, if you have a free drive bay, add an internal drive and direct the install to that drive.  I would never install an application to external drives. I might save my rendered files there, but never executables.

Definitely put the Poser runtime on an external drive.  App on C:, runtime on external (R: or P: seems like a logical choice.)

Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc is what you're looking for to force Windows to never change the drive letter.

Quote - You can override the default installation location during the install of course, but if you are thinking about moving runtimes around after install, you are just asking for trouble.

If the runtimes being moved aren't the ones where the Poser executable is located, you can move them to your heart's delight without any issue.

Quote - "This time around we are going to put the runtime folder on an external hard drive, and I have some questions before I mess that up."

 "Also, is there a way to stop the external hard drive name letters from changing?"

"Anything else I should be aware of with external runtime?"

Go to this link to read about External Runtimes and you can download the actual folder structure that I use in my exteral runtimes. It'll save you some time from creating folders.  I use multiple runtimes for better management.  I explain how to edit the folders and how to install content in them.  I'll actually be demonstrating this in my online workshop this week.

As for your computer drives changing drive letters, I would recommend turning the external drive, that keeps changing drive letters, on first.  This will ensure that the drive letter will not change for that drive.  I get the same problem from time to time and I have had it happen on more than one computer. If I had to guess the cause of the problem, then I would probably say that it's likely to happen when the external is turned off mannually while the computer is on and not after the computer shutdown. 

Quote - My suggestion, the Poser installation on the PC's HD and all the other external runtimes on the external HD. New USB 3.0 makes external HD's nearly as fast as internal HD's.

I dream of getting new USB 3.0 ports.  I think my external runtimes would really like the improvement.

Quote - Definitely put the Poser runtime on an external drive.  App on C:, runtime on external (R: or P: seems like a logical choice.)

Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc is what you're looking for to force Windows to never change the drive letter.

Thanks for all the help folks. gennenburg's suggestion seems to be the easiest way. Install Poser on C: and the runtime on the external drive, during installation of Poser. I can also put all the downloaded content on the external drive so it doesn't get lost if the PC crashes at some stage.

One question gennenburg, in diskmgmt.msc I don't see an option to not change the drive letter. What do I click to see that?

I don't know which OS you are running, but under WindowXP, you need to select the external in the panel and right click to deplay the menu.  I would imagine it is 'Change Drive Letters and Path..'.  You should have that external already connected and active.