[SOLVED] External Hard Drives being accessed while installing

[PalsyP]

Hello, This is my first post, I have searched for a similar issue, but couldn't find anything.

So, I bought a Seagate Portable Drive 2TB (STGX2000400) a while ago to help back up my 1TB M.2 SSD. I keep it connected to the USB port (I'm physically disabled, so plugging things in and out is a chore for me). I've noticed that it's very slow accessing (probably waking up) when needed.... This is fine as I rarely use it apart from my weekly backup at 4 am. I have now disabled the power setting "USB Selective Suspend" to see if that helps with my issue.....

Anyway, when I install/uninstall software, the installers always want to access my external drives (I have 5 other USB drives by the way)... Is this normal, accessing every drive? I've only noticed the slowness of the installations after I bought this Seagate drive... Having a M.2 SSD as C is fast as hell, but installing/updating/uninstalling software can take up to 4 minutes now.

 

[Grobe]

The thing about some installers is they look for the partition with most space (for unpacking temporary files), regardless of what your %TMP% variable is set to. That is very very corporate and the user cannot override this behavior. I've seen that myself.
That also explain the hdd activity you see.

And an important lesson from others: You should get some expansion cable or similar to let you plug/unplug the usb hdd easilly. Why? Because when the day comes where you get one of those infections that encrypt all files, it will also destroy the content on the external drive too, and if that happens you in fact does not have a functional backup.