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I have a SSD as my primary (C:) drive, mainly used for quickly loading games.

It's pretty small (~30 GB) so I want to keep things that don't really need a speed boost off of it. I attempted installing the Visual Studio 2010 Express beta last night, and it claimed to require 2.1 GB of space so I changed the install directory to a secondary, non-SSD drive.

After this, the installer said that it would use 1.8 GB on C: and ~200 MB on the secondary drive.

While this token gesture of moving 1/10 of the app to the place I told it to is cute, I really want to install everything I can to the secondary drive.

Is there any way to install all of Visual Studio 2010 Express to a drive besides C:?

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Personally, I put all my games on an HDD and try to keep as much free space on my SSD as possible. The SSD will help with game loading times, but probably won't improve performance in any other way; the GPU and CPU are the bottlenecks. Plus games can use up a lot of space... – sblair Mar 10 '10 at 20:55
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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

No, much of what VS installs (regardless of version) goes into subdirectories in your Windows folder: things such as the .NET frameworks, shared files, etc. So if you installed Windows to the C: drive, VS has to install much of it's core there as well.

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That's what I was afraid of. It seems like Microsoft is doing everything it can to make me regret getting an SSD. – TwentyMiles Mar 10 '10 at 17:56
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@Twenty: "... to make me regret getting such a small SSD." - Fixed that for ya ;-) – fretje Mar 10 '10 at 18:08
Yea, that's the main reason I've held off on getting one. My C: drive always ends up being huge by the time I've installed everything I want. – BBlake Mar 10 '10 at 19:20
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up vote 4 down vote

Kind of.

The setup DVD contains a file Setup\baseline.dat. This is a large text file which stores information on where to install large chunks of the software.

You need to edit the text file and change the lines which say

DefaultPath=[ProgramFilesFolder]\VC\

...

DefaultPath=[ProgramFilesFolder]\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0

...

DefaultPath=[ProgramFilesFolder]\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE

to the following

DefaultPath=D:\Applications\VS2010\VC\

...

DefaultPath=D:\Applications\VS2010\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0

...

DefaultPath=D:\Applications\VS2010\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE

That will get most of the stuff off C.

This also works with VisualStudio 2005/2008 and the Express Editions. I've been using this trick for years and never encountered a problem.

n.B: Some parts of the installer also use locations such as DefaultPath=[WindowsFolder]\assembly. You can edit these in the same way to free up even more space, but I can't guarantee this won't break things. Obviously if you're installing from a DVD/iso you need to copy the entire contents of the DVD to a folder before editing baseline.dat, otherwise it will be read-only.

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I've just used the tip about editing baseline.dat to point to a SSD drive and now VS2010 won't load and edit my projects. So instead of speeding me up it has wasted half a day. – Clive Dec 14 '11 at 11:29
Buyer beware? It's worked for me on half a dozen different machines with different hardware over several incarnations of Visual Studio. Worst case scenario is it doesn't work -- like for you -- and you just install Visual Studio on a regular disk, which should take no more than 30 minutes even on an EeePC 901's Intel Atom with 1GB of RAM on a 3.7GB SSD. Use your text editors Find & Replace feature. What exactly took you half a day? If you found a solution I'll edit my original post. – Gary Oldfaber Dec 15 '11 at 14:49
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up vote 0 down vote

Just like any program, you can move the folder and drop symlinks in its place.

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Care to explain how to do this? You need the command line, right? – Daniel Beck Dec 28 '11 at 5:36
Well, to drop a symlink, ya. Or you use the Link Shell Extension. I just drop a symlink of Program Files into the C drive and off I go. – surfasb Dec 28 '11 at 6:51
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