Using external HD for Daz content?

Riggswolfe

So, my 2 Terabyte drive that has both games and Daz stuff on it is finally running low on room.  (It has about 206 GB still but that's still only roughly 10% of the original space.)

I am considering moving my content database to an external drive such as this one:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TKFEE5S/ref=twister_B00TS6JL4S?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Have any of you done this before? Does it negatively impact loading times for content? What about DIM? Does it work ok with external drives?

ThatGuy

I've been using a 3 TB ex hd for a couple of years now and it works just fine.  I use it for all my contents, daz, poser and vue. No issue with DIM as long as you set up the correct place in your settings.  I recommend you go with a 4TB from Western Digital, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01GKFQCE6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Ghosty12

There is one caveat with using an external over a internal drive and that is transfer speed..  While Sata 3 has a top theoretical speed of 6Gbps and most HDD's do, do that speed the most interesting it that USB 3.0 does have a theoretical top speed of 5Gbps you will rarely if at all get anywhere near that high and in most cases you might get 480Mbps..

The thing is that external USB drives are mainly designed for the purposes of backing up data and not really for constant file transfers, if you want an external for the purposes that you are wanting a better setup might be a NAS = Network Attached Storage system..  Or if you have a spare older computer that you don't use anymore you can turn that into a NAS Box..

joseft

it works perfectly fine. I have my runtimes on an external drive. Data transfer rates may be slower than an internal drive, but the simple things like a piece of clothing doesnt take long at all. Like 5 seconds, so it really isnt noticable nor a hindrance. The only things that can take some time is more detailed items, like HD characters saved as scene subsets. They can take about 30 seconds or so to load into the scene. But really, how often do you need to load things into the scene?

once things are loaded into your scene, its done. there is no constant data transfer, so the only thing affected is the initial load time

for me its really not a bother.

nicstt

ghosty12 said:

There is one caveat with using an external over a internal drive and that is transfer speed..  While Sata 3 has a top theoretical speed of 6Gbps and most HDD's do, do that speed the most interesting it that USB 3.0 does have a theoretical top speed of 5Gbps you will rarely if at all get anywhere near that high and in most cases you might get 480Mbps..

The thing is that external USB drives are mainly designed for the purposes of backing up data and not really for constant file transfers, if you want an external for the purposes that you are wanting a better setup might be a NAS = Network Attached Storage system..  Or if you have a spare older computer that you don't use anymore you can turn that into a NAS Box..

It depends; i have an external enclosure that I use with SSD, speed wise it's very fast; I don't use it for Daz, I use an interal SSD for my documents - I prefer a silent computer and don't mind the extra cost involved; with the exception of renders, a small amount of noise then from the fans on the graphics card(s).

Riggswolfe

Yeah, Speed is what I was wondering about. I suppose another option is to simply buy a larger internal HDD. I should probably open my case up and look to see what space I have available for internal drives and such. In fact, this particular drive is getting on in years as it is.

ANGELREAPER1972

apparently not so good for plugins though mainly that new headshop oneclick only works if you have your content on the default drive and apperently does not work with the 4.9+beta haven't read about issues with the other plugins but other than that read most have not had problems and prefer using an external drive and most do that since most computers now have small main drives and not many have additional drives on their systems I've gotta be close to 200gb of content myself

Sensual Art

I doubt if scene load times would be noticably impacted because of the drive being external. Even for complex scenes the IO overhead is significatly less compared to the overall load time. Say, if you scene takes five minutes to load, losing a few more seconds in network latency wouldn't make any significant difference compared to the convenience of an external drive.