Blast Database on External Hard Disk

Question

[Suraj Shah]

Hello, Can I create Local Blast database on my external hard disk. if yes then how?

Thanks.

[Ram]

Before you ask on forums, you should really Google this stuff and try on your own. Have you tried creating a BLAST database on any drive? What do you think the difference would be between an internal disk and an external disk once either is mounted on the OS? How would accessing them for the BLAST db be different?

Answer 1

[Mensur Dlakic]

BLAST databases can be stored on any kind of disk, so that's a yes to your question. However, it helps if a disk is reasonably fast.

After copying the file with sequences in fasta format to the external disk, run makeblastdb on it to create BLAST indices.