Matlab crashing when needing large data usage

I'm using Matlab 2016a on OS X 10.11.3 and I am having trouble running code that generates large amount of data. I bought an external hard drive, formatted it to exFat and copied my Matlab application onto the external drive. When I run my code, which needs 80GB of space for the process (it is a 1 Terabyte drive) Matlab crashes (just completely closes the application without giving any report) after 50GB is used (as seen in Activity Monitor). How can I stop this from crashing?

[jgg]

What do you mean, when you run your code? If you're running your code it uses RAM, which isn't related to the size of your drive. Maybe you can give more information?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

It would not be recommended to format the complete external drive as exFAT. You should format most of it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the work. If you have a need to share the external drive with a PC by plugging it in to the PC, you could create a second partition on it that you format as exFAT, and copy files to it at need.

If your task needs a large amount of memory, enough that you need to swap to disk, and you want to make it the external drive, then you need to go through a bunch of trouble. See for example http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1465/how-can-i-move-virtual-memory-swap-files-to-a-different-drive-or-partition or the very different approach at http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20001215021440138