install WGSA on an external hard drive

One requirement for installing WGSA is the large storage space for the resources. However, the disk space on a server is usually limited. As a cheap alternative, you can install WGSA on an external hard drive attached to a Linux machine, with a little sacrifice of the reading/writing performance.

The basic installation following the general guide, with some special issues taken care of:

  1. The mounting point of the external hard drive shall not contain blank space and the files on the external hard can have execution permission. If the external hard drive you purchase is designed for PC/Windows, you may find the default file system is NTFS and the default mount point is something like "Seagate Expansion Drive". Then you need to remount the external hard drive with specified mounting point and "exec" option. Here is how it can be done in Ubuntu:

    • Make sure there's no other program that is using the hard drive.

    • Open program Gparted, find the drive, unmount it. Then edit the label and make sure the new label does not have blank space in it. Apply the change, wait to see the message saying the change is successfully completed.

    • Open program Disks, click the partition you want to re-mount, edit the mount options and add "exec". Then mount the external hard drive by clicking the triangle below ("play button").

  2. Create a WGSA folder on the external hard drive instead of on an internal hard drive. For example, suppose the mounting point of the external hard drive is /mnt/Seagate, then you can create a WGSA folder with mkdir /mnt/Seagate/WGSA. Then follow the general guide to create .vep, vep etc. under /mnt/Seagate/WGSA and install VEP, snpEff and ANNOVAR under /mnt/Seagate/WGSA. Then copy the resources folder to /mnt/Seagate/WGSA.