USB flash drive for content/Runtime?
Alley Rat
Posts: 405
in The Commons
Hi all,
Has anyone moved their installed DAZ/Poser content to a thumb drive? I'm looking at a 64GB drive for my creative content since I don't need the space (or expense) of an SSD, but would like that solid state speed increase. Any input from those who've tried it is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I seem to recall that the speed you'll get from a thumb drive might be in the 10-20 MB/second range, where a SATA HDD might be 10 times that. I could be way off, but you might want to do some checking, and maybe some tests on your existing thumb drive. I'm sure you can get a free app to check performance speed on a thumb drive.
Yeah, USB or USB 2.0 is gonna be slow due to the limitation of the port speed. Maybe USB 3.0 on a USB 3.x port.
Ah, ok. I will make sure to use USB 3.0 then. Thanks!
I think if you look at performance of various thumb drives you'll see that the interface (3.0 or not) can make little or no difference. A brief search on thumb drive performance shows that there can be VASTLY different read/write speeds depending on thumb drive brand and model.
Which is why I suggested to do a little research so you don't end up being disappointed by a painfully slow access to your content.
For example, here's the test results for a Sandisk USB 3.0 thumb drive:
Capacity (Advertised / Actual): 16GB / 14.5GB
Read Speed: 18.3 MBps
Write Speed: 4.6 MBps
Painfully slow.
And here's a Lexar USB 3.0 drive:
Actual Capacity: 14.8GB
Read Speed: 106.0 MBps
Write Speed: 15.3 MBps
Read speed much, much faster
If you want speed and flash memory, go with topline SD cards or compact flash rather than stick drives. That said, I honestly can't even imagine using something as small as a flash drive to store my content. I've gotten decent resuilts using USB 3.0 portable external hard drives, the current models of which are which are getting absurdly cheap and use flash for data transfer rates at 120MB/s and up. You can now buy a 1TB external for under $50 on Amazon, and I just bought three 4TB drives for $99.00 each.
Yeah, I tend to agree about the USB external hard drives. I have a few of them and they're nice for storing lots of stuff. Not sure I'd store content on them, partly because of a concern about speed (which may be unfounded...I've never actually tested vs. a SATA HDD), and partly about concerns about keeping D|S from going crazy with DIM and everything loading and accessing content on an external drive. Again, maybe unfounded....
Instead I just put a big 3TB SATA HDD inside my desktop and let it sit there to store stuff and provide backup.
I have a 1 TB 2.5 inch external usb drive attached to my laptop which I use for my content and it seems to work fine, it is also half full so a usb stick or flash card wouldn't hold it :)
Fishtales,
That's good to know, thanks. So do you tell DIM to install to the external drive? I forget if you can tell it to install to multiple locations....
Actually that might be a good option for me, since I have 3 desktops on the network. I can install to a single external USB drive and take it to any desktop as needed.
Hmmm....
Yes, it installs to the External, unless of course I forget to have it plugged in :)
Actually, there is a half-TB SD card available now, and there'll be a full 1 TB version in the near future... but, for the same price as SanDisk's 513 GB card, you can get over 12 TBs in conventional hard disck storage. Then again, the playstation 4 uses 1 TB solid state cards that sell for just $52 each, so if there was an easy way to write to them, it would be an even cheaper alternative.
Yes Sir. I just loaded 15 gigs worth of bill board props onto a 20gig scandisk cruzer thumb drive & worked like a charmed. The only reason I put the bill board props on a thumb drive was because the the size of the prop set was so big, I did not want put something that big into my content drive with out a uninstaller so the thumb drive worked out great. anytime i need to use the bill board prop I just plugin my thumb drive and bingo good to go. just make sure you point your daz directories to the thumb drive or you'll have to manually load things.
I have all of my content installed to a regular Seagate 5tb external USB 3.0 drive and it works perfectly fine. I have most other programs, including some games isntalled into another, and they all work fine. I don't recomend usb2.0 for programs, but 3.0 and higher is perfectly acceptable for me.
I tried the "install all the content in one place and share it amongst the network" thing and keeping the libraries up to date on both machines got to be too much of a hassle, so I broke down and reinstalled my content on the secondary computer again. It will definitely work over the network, but everytime you add something new you will have to update your database, which takes a while. And I wound up with several products that would install a completely new copy of themselves into the library every time I updated the database.
...yeah I'd need a 1 TB USB drive to contain my Library/Runtimes. At around 700$ - 800$, that's a little spendy for my budget.