Bit of a strange question for you.
I've got an iMac and, while it's quiet, the hard disk whirr is still noisy. I like to work in as much silence as possible so I've set the hard disk spindown timeout to 1 minute.
What I'd like to do is make Nisus Writer Express save its files to a USB memory stick, bypassing the hard disk, so that it doesn't wake it up and make my computer noisy again! So is it possible to change the store directory, and the backup directory, to specify a different drive?
And if I did this, would the program stop writing things to the hard disk, or would it still write occasional bits and pieces, such as config data? Would it be possible to run the entire app from a USB memory stick?
Working from a USB memory stick
You cannot put the NWX document manager folder (~/Documents/Nisus Documents) or the temporary backup files folder (~/Documents/Nisus Documents/Backups) anywhere else but their default locations, so if you insist on keeping your documents in the Nisus Document Manager and have autosave set to "to temporary backup files" in Nisus Preferences you are out of luck. However, if you save your documents to the regular filesystem using File>Save As... and set autosave to "overwrites existing files" in Preferences you can keep your documents on your flash drive and prevent NWX from reading and writing to the HD.
I doubt that this will entirely stop HD accesses however, Mac OS X will probably still access virtual memory at least occasionally, and NWX will still have to be launched from either /Applications or ~/Applications so there's really nothing you can do about that.
I doubt that this will entirely stop HD accesses however, Mac OS X will probably still access virtual memory at least occasionally, and NWX will still have to be launched from either /Applications or ~/Applications so there's really nothing you can do about that.