Installing SL On External Hard Drive

If I were to install SL on an External Hard Drive, would I have to start my avatar over from scratch? Would my "Pyrite Sopwith" account be affected?

The data for your account (avatar/inventory/money....), are stored on the Linden-server.
Everytime you make a new installation of the SL Client, all data will be transfered to your client when you log on. It does not matter if the client is installed on an internal or external drive.

So I guess that means my user account won't be affected if I install the program onto an external hard drive and uninstall the one I have on my "original" hard drive? I can still log on under the same username unless I choose to delete my SL account (which I certainly won't delete my account any time soon)?

Thats correct, but i would not recommend to install SL on an external harddrive. I suppose that your external drive is connected via USB 2.0 to your pc. Despite the fact that USB 2.0 is fast, it is by far not so fast like an internal drive. You will have big performance problems.

Why you want to install SL anyway on an external drive?

If you have enabled chat logging, and you want to maintain the SL cache from an internal drive, you must point the SL Cache to the previous cache folder. Depending on your OS, it maybe something like:
C:/Documents and Settings/<your user name for the PC>/Application Data/Secondlife/

If you are using an external Sata II port to hot swap your external drive, it should work without issue on the native system. It may not work, should you plug that into another system, as there may not be the same port mapping.

I know someone who installed SL on a flash/thumb drive before, and ran it just fine from another computer. There is also a script available somewhere, and you can search the forums for where, that keeps SL on a flash drive from saving anything to the hard drive of the computer on which you are running the flash drive.

Not sure how it would work with an external drive, though. But a 2 GB flash drive was more than enough.

Good point. It's probably better for me to run it from my original hard drive than an external drive. Thanks for the heads-up.


I guess I may have a second thought now. It's better for me to do a weekly defrag of my hard drive, if anything at all.


Maybe I could try that approach. But does the program run reasonably fast on a USB Flash drive? My USB Flash Drive holds about 4 GB of space.


Is there a link to that particular forum?


Does that depend on the computer itself? And what major performance problems are you referring to - loading up of images? Non-voice chatting ability?

Also, are there any USB Flash Drives that can store about 8GB or more space?

USB will only transfer 2mbps or so. also, you need to clean out the temp files associated with SL. you can do ths by "run"ing (run program): %appdata%\secondlife and clearing the user settings folder

He says it ran better than it does on his home computer. Not-any-more-than-normal lag and less freezing than he normally experienced. However, the computer he plugged the flash drive into had more memory and a better graphics card than his home computer did.



I don't have one offhand, but you might find something if you just search the term "flash drive". I think that's where my friend found the information.