SharePoint Installation location

Question

I'm new to the administrator field with sharepoint and am learning the ropes on the installation of the product.

Question about the File Location option that is availible when you are running through the installation, specifically when you are able to choose the "server type" of "complete or Stand-alone" it allows you to choose a location of where you would like to install sharepoint to....

My question is why we would ever leverage a location that wasn't on the primary drive c:\ for example...is there any pros and cons? Anything that we still have to worry about that is installed afterwords if we pick a drive that is not the primary drive?

Answer 1

SharePoint is always installed on the boot drive - typically C:

There should be lot of things that you should be considering if you really want to have SharePoint in a different drive

1. Disk space - The minimum requirement for SharePoint 2010 to be installed in a hard drive is 80 GB, not to think that SharePoint is that big, but SharePoint must have sufficient space for the base installation and sufficient space for diagnostics such as logging, debugging, creating memory dumps, and so on. Refer the detailed requirements from Technet

2. SharePoint Logs - Even if you point SharePoint to be installed on a different drive, it manages to create C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14 folders - the 14 hive for storing important information including Logs.

3. Dependencies - SharePoint is dependent with a mix of technologies like IIS and SQL server, where in IIS gets loaded by default to the boot drive usually C, which would have the Inetpub folders and so on.

Also visit this post which gives you more detail on how these can be moved to other drives if you wish to and visit these technet issues that people have raised after they have installed on a different drive - Issue 1 and Issue 2

On a last note, I would prefer SharePoint installation to be on the default C drive and make life much easier :)

Good Luck .

Answer 2

The only reasons I can really think of are space and disk contention. If you have a small drive for your system drive you might want to place the installation files on another drive so that any customizations that are stored in the file system that you make will not take up additional drive space. Disk contention would just be a case for optimization. I'm not sure that would make a huge difference on a system dedicated to being a web front end, though.