How to download Matlab to an external hard drive?

Hello, I have a Macbook Retina Pro (2013 model) and don't have enough space to download Matlab to my internal hard drive. I saw that some people were able to download Matlab to their external hard drives and was hoping you could share the process for doing so. So far, my installer only allows me to pick either my Applications Folder or the internal drive as a place to download Matlab onto. For reference, I am attempting to download Matlab R2017a, and have a Seagate 1TB external drive I would like to use. The license is also academic, and titled Total Headcount.

[José-Luis]

If I was you, I'd make some space in your computer. Sounds like installing Matlab on an external hard drive is begging for slowness.

[Walter Roberson]

Some of the Seagate 1TB external drives are faster than the internal drives. The Retina Pro 2013 already came equipped with USB 3.0, so you should not assume that external drives are slow in that configuration.

[Elizabeth Adam]

I downloaded my student SIMULINK license on my external SSD hard drive and the whole thing takes up 414 GB of storage. I don't understand how it can take so much space when the application is said to weight about 14 GB total and most of my friends have it taking a maximum of 25 GB with all of the add-ons... HELP

[Walter Roberson]

Was your external drive formatted as one of the Apple file systems, or was it formatted as exFAT ?

[Walter Roberson]

Generally speaking, MacOS has links that can save a lot of space in applications, and if you are not careful in how you copy a MacOS application to exFAT or NFTS then the files might be copied in full multiple times instead of being linked.

[Mariano Luna]

Hello.

How can I be sure it's linked? :o

[Stefano Bargione]

Hello!

I wanted to ask how you managed to solve your problem.

I also have a macbook pro bought in october 2019, and I was looking for an external hard drive to buy in order to install MATLAB there and I found this one that could be good at first sight.

However, I was advised to look for one with thunderbolt connection (which is really expensive albeit supported by my mac). I don't know if the one I provided you the link of has sufficient information speed transmission (i.e. 130 mb) to run smoothly matlab scripts.

Can You suggest me what do?

Also, do you know if there is a guide to look at for the installation process in an external hard drive or is the same like here ?

Thanks you very much in advance

[Walter Roberson]

Toms Hardware has a review of the drive; https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lacie-mobile-drive-portable-hdd,6264.html . It figures the drive is about 140 megabytes per second, but says that you can get pretty much equally fast drives from other manufacturers for less money.

I am having difficulty finding hard information about the magnetic recording technique used in the STHG2000400 inside the drive. What I do find is that Lacie is a Seagate company, and according to Seagate's charts, all of Seagate's 2.5" drives use SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). What that means in practice is that your drive would probably start slowing down noticably when it is roughly half full.

The drive is a 5400 rpm drive. Adding a thunderbolt interface to a 5400 rpm drive is not very useful compared to using USB 3.0: 5400 rpm drives cannot keep up transfers fast enough to fill a USB 3.0 pipeline, so there is no point in paying the extra cost for a thunderbolt.

About 6 months ago, I did go through the trouble of buying thunderbolt for my iMac: after a bunch of research, I bought an external enclosure, and I put high speed drives into it; then a couple of months ago I also put an SSD drive into the enclosure. But I am not getting full performance because I am going through a Thunderbolt 2 (what my old iMac has) to Thunderbolt 3 adapter.

In the 2.5" non-SSD market, I would not recommend Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt could potentially make sense for high end SSD like a Samsung EVO.

Generally speaking, if you are using a MacBook Pro, you probably do not need Thunderbolt for performance. MacBook Pro are not aimed at highest performance. Thunderbolt is marketted at tasks such as video editing, for which you would be using a Mac Pro or iMac or iMac Pro.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The place where it says /Applications, you can type in a new path instead, such as

/Volumes/BackupSlim/Applications

if your drive is mounted under volume name BackupSlim

Alternately, proceed to click on Browse, and then

Find the icon for the external drive and drag it into the name and attributes section. The Applications title will change to reflect the name of the drive mount point, and the root level of the drive will be displayed. Navigate to the directory you want to install into.

[Melody]

Hi Walter,

I've done this but continue to encounter errors on setting my path. The error message reads:

Warning: MATLAB did not appear to successfully set the search path. To recover for this session of MATLAB, type "restoredefaultpath;matlabrc". To find out how to avoid this

warning the next time you start MATLAB, type "docsearch problem path" after recovering for this session.

And another error thrown:

Caused by: com.mathworks.mvm.exec.MvmRuntimeException: Unrecognized function or variable 'internal.matlab.desktop.editor.breakpointsForAllFiles'.

When I run the functions it recommends, it just creates a new MATLAB folder in my downloads, which is where I used to have matlab installed.

Any ideas on how to resolve this are absolutley appreciated!

Answer 2

[Blessing Sokoya]

The external harddrive is located under Volumes so MacHD>Volumes>External Harddrive Name

Answer 3

[Ruturaj Patil]

I have the same situation!!! NEED HELP