Vista on the Dell Mini 9: Installing applications on an SD card

I’m still trying new things with the Mini 9. I now have an image file that I can restore to the Mini which has my base install after running sysprep. The problem I have is storage space – the SSD isn’t _quite_ big enough.

So, Richard wandered in this morning and handed me a 4Gb SD card to experiment with. The question: Can we use the SD card and install app onto it?

Our initial finding was a big fat no. Visual Studio setup refused to install to ‘removable media’. Bearing in mind all we’d done at this point was stuff an SD card into the card slot I wasn’t too surprised.

I fired up computer manager and went into disk admin. The partition on the SD card was FAT32, so we replaced that with an NTFS partition for a start.

I then went into the drive properties and changed the Policy settings. By default the SD reader is set to allow instant removal. Changing that to enable write caching means I will have to use the tray icon to ‘Safely Remove Hardware’, but I think that’s the key setting to allow me to install apps. However, I wanted to make things a little more integrated, so I created a folder on the C: drive called ‘SD Program Files’ and used it as a mount point for the SD card.

Visual Studio is now happily installing to the SD card.

As a 16Gb SD card is around twenty-five quid, this makes a reasonable approach to increasing storage space, assuming apps run reasonably quickly from the drive.

That’s the next test…