Can I install MATLAB on an external hard drive and run it on my macbook pro? And if yes, then how do I do it?

I have a macbook pro with 16 gigabytes of RAM and 250 gigabytes of flash memory. I don't have enough space on my internal hard drive to download MATLAB, so I want to put MATLAB on a 1 terabyte external hard drive with thunderbolt connection with 128 gb/s. I want to know if this is possible before I buy the hard drive and MATLAB since it'll cost $300. If it is possible how exactly would I go about setting MATLAB up on the external hard drive?

[ANDRES Camacho]

Works perefectly Thank you so much, you saved me from an F in my Operational Research Course

[Stefano Bargione]

Hello everyone,

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). 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

Answer 1

[Risto Ranne]

I have Matlab installed on a Samsung t5 drive and it works really great because of the speed of the drive. First it didn't give me the opportunity to choose an external drive as the installation folder, but I got around that one! I made an Alias to the external drive, and put it in the applications folder of my mac's drive. Now when installing Matlab, and choosing the installation folder, I double clicked the alias in the applications folder, and BAM! I got access to install it to the external drive!

[Walter Roberson]

At the time you do the install, MATLAB asks for the name of the folder to install into, so you can specify an external folder at that time.

Answer 2

[Elizabeth Adam]

Do we need to format the hard drive in any particular way to be compatible with MATLAB? I want to use an exFAT format so I can store data from both Mac and PC on mine, but I'm afraid I won't be able to download MATLAB on it if it is the case..

Answer 3

[Walter Roberson]

I am booting off of an external hard drive on my MacBook Pro, so it is certainly possible ;-) But as a test I just launched MATLAB off of one of my other drives and the only problem I encountered was the Java problems that are typical when trying to run older releases of MATLAB in Yosemite without applying the known fixes.

I suggest you look more carefully at the transfer speed ratings on your proposed drive: if you are not using an SSD drive then a USB 3.0 drive is probably going to be nearly as fast for less expensive.

The drive I am using now is a Seagate BackupPlus for Mac, 2 Terrabyte, $CDN 140 (about $US100), which is not much larger than a cell phone. When I did the research in December, the 2 Terrabyte drives were the largest available single spindle fast rotation slim drives, with the 4 Terrabyte drives implemented as two slower spindles, nearly twice as thick and slower. Larger fast drives were available in Desktop housings but I wanted portable. There were some other drives on the market in the category that were faster on some particular benchmarks but this one rated strongly all around and had the best reliability rating of any of the drives I found in its class.

If you only have a Thunderbolt connection (or your USB connections are full) then this particular drive is not the best one for you. Thunderbolt drives are still more expensive, and the low budget Thunderbolt drives are not necessarily faster.

What you want to avoid is drives spinning at 5400 RPM -- not unless you get into the heavy duty RAID 3 or higher configurations. You want the drive to spin at least 7800 RPM for USB3.0 or Thunderbolt, and 10000 RPM is to be preferred. If you are looking at a drive and it does not list the spindle speed then even if it says Thunderbolt you need to assume that it is 5400 RPM unless you can prove otherwise. 5400 RPM is fine for USB 2.0 but the only reason to get a 5400 RPM drive for USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt is low cost.