How in the Tech

Relocating Google Chrome’s user profile directory

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 19, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Google Chrome

Solid state drives or SSD are gaining popularity by leaps and bounds. The performance improvements over a traditional hard drive are astounding and as the price continues to fall, the upgrade option becomes available to a wider range of budgets. While SSD is lightening quick there still remains a few draw backs. First, the size available is limited, at least at sanely priced units – this limits them to mainly your operating system and application installs and not your collection of media; you’d need a second hard drive for that. In the end, that’s a small compromise for many. Secondly, SSD has the notion of limited writes. Simply, the drive can only be written to a certain amount of times before it becomes worn out. It should be stated that USB thumb drives or other types of memory cards, such as for your camera, suffer the same problem.

While limiting the writing of data to the SSD is good a computing practice, it’s not something to overly stress over. However, there are a number of customizations that you should strongly consider that are painless, and can help limit the writes – all without really affecting the overall performance.

One such tweak involves relocating your browser user and cache directory off your speedy SSD C drive onto a secondary drive. As every visit to every web page generally involves the writing of some cache information to the disk, moving this off of SSD is logical.

Unfortunately if you are a Google Chrome user the ability to move the user directory isn’t something you are likely to stumble across as you poke through the preferences. Rather, Chrome must be passed a command line parameter pointing to the directory to use.

Locate your Google Chrome application shortcut in your Start Menu, right-click and choose Properties.

In the Target box you should see the full path to your chrome.exe. At the end append the line –user-data-dir=”d:\<new chrome user directory location>”

Using this shortcut will not load Chrome with the user profile located in the directory you’ve pointed it to. If the profile doesn’t exist, Chrome will create a new one.

If you already have an existing Chrome profile you will need to move it over to this location using Windows Explorer. The default location for Chrome’s profile is in your Windows profile directory; in Vista and 7 at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\Default. Copy the the Default folder into the folder you supplied for the -user-data-dir above.

If you are a Windows 7 user and are utilizing the redesigned taskbar and subsequently have Chrome permanently pinned to it, you might be unsure how to actually access the Chrome Properties shortcut dialog as above. The trick is to right-click on the Chrome icon on your task bar and then right-click again on the Google Chrome label in the resulting jump-list. There you will find the Properties option.