Move Ollama Models to different location

After installing ollama better to reconfigure ollama to store them in new place right away. So after we pull a new model, it doesn’t get downloaded to the old location. Ollama is a text-based frontend to LLM AI Models and an API that can host those too. Install Ollama Goto https://ollama.com/download To install Ollama on linux: curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh Ollama on Windows is on page: https://ollama.com/download/windows Ollama for Mac is there too: https://ollama.com/download/macOllamaSetup.exe Download, List and Remove Ollama models To download some Ollama models: Go to Ollama Library (https://ollama.com/library) and find the model you need, there you can also find model tags and sizes. Then run: ollama pull gemma2:latest # Or get slightly smarter one still nicely fitting into 16GB VRAM: ollama pull gemma2:27b-instruct-q3_K_S # Or: ollama pull llama3.1:latest ollama pull llama3.1:8b-instruct-q8_0 ollama pull mistral-nemo:12b-instruct-2407-q6_K ollama pull mistral-small:22b-instruct-2409-q4_0 ollama pull phi3:14b-medium-128k-instruct-q6_K ollama pull qwen2.5:14b-instruct-q5_0 To check the models Ollama has in local repository: ollama list To remove some unneeded model: ollama rm qwen2:7b-instruct-q8_0 # for example Ollama Models location By default the model files are stored: Windows: C:\Users%username%.ollama\models Linux: /usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models macOS: ~/.ollama/models Configuring Ollama models path on Windows To create an environment variable on Windows you can follow these instructions: Open Windows Settings. Go to System. Select About Select Advanced System Settings. Go to the Advanced tab. Select Environment Variables…. Click on New… And create a variable called OLLAMA_MODELS pointing to where you want to store the models Move / change Ollama models location on Linux Edit the ollama systemd service parameters sudo systemctl edit ollama.service This will open an editor. For each environment variable, add a line Environment under section [Service]: [Service] Environment="OLLAMA_MODELS=/specialplace/ollama/models" Save and exit. There is also a User and Group params, those must have access to this folder. Reload systemd and restart Ollama: sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl restart ollama if something went wrong systemctl status ollama.service sudo journalctl -u ollama.service Storing files on NTFS overhead Please be aware that if you are running linux and keeping your models on NTFS formatted partition, your models would be loading much - more then 20% slower. ntfs.mount cpu usage Install Ollama on Windows to specific folder Together with the models .\OllamaSetup.exe /DIR=D:\OllamaDir Expose Ollama API to internal network Internal here means local network. Add to service config: [Service] Environment="OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0"