Why is Windows 8.1 using an external USB drive as the primary for .EXE Decompressions?

26
2014-06
  • kob490

    Funny issue here. I have bought a Samsung 250GB SSD drive and installed a fresh copy of windows 8 on it which I updated to 8.1. in addition to this drive this machine also has 2 internal drives and 1 USB external hard drive.

    for some reason when i try to install applications from a compressesed .EXE file, for example SQL server.. the decompressed filed automatically goes to drive F: which is the External Hard Drive. when disconnecting it, the decompression goes to drive D: which is one of the internal drives but not the primary SSD where windows is installed.

    Why does this happen, and how could i set primary drive C to be the default target for decompression?

    • Answers
  • magicandre1981

    Windows always expands Setup files to the drive with most free space which is in your case the external Drive when no ROOTDRIVE is set.

    If it is not an administrative installation, or if the installer can find no network drives, the installer sets ROOTDRIVE to the local drive that can be written to having the most free space.


    • Related Question

    windows - Why would ExpressCache.exe appear to be constantly using an external HDD?
  • Daniel

    I bought ASUS VivoBook S550CM with hybrid drive SSD/HDD. There are many pre-installed Asus utilities, ExpressCache included.

    Here is the problem: every time I connect any external USB HDD, the LED indicator on external HDD starts to blink. When I open Resource Monitor I see that ExpressCache.exe is constantly writing/reading something from external drive. See screenshot. So all external drives are being constantly accessed. This is slowing them down when I want to use them and they are very noisy. I tried to reinstall the Asus ExpressCache utility and nothing changed... Hard reset didn't work too...

    Any idea on how to fix this...???

    Screenshot:

    1


    • Related Answers
  • Rick

    A possible reason for the activity is that there is a feature within ExpressCache that will defragment the disks connected to the system. This is typically done as a background task and will not effect the performance of the system although you may see the activity a bit high at the beginning but as the disk drives become defragmented the activity will be reduced to almost zero.