You know you have a DAZ problem when...
Jason Galterio
Posts: 2,562
...you run out of harddrive space and can't install what you bought today.
...it takes ten minutes to install and format the new harddrives.
...but then takes more than 24 hours to re-install your content, even though you don't have to download anything.
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Yes, but see the bright side, you can afford a new, bigger, hard drive.
Only for the moment... Now with the extra space I can buy MORE DAZ stuff.
... your backlog of things needing to be installed is bigger then your old hard drive!
9,795 installed products and counting. It literally took from 6 PM last night until Noon today to install everything using DIM. And I only had to download a handful of updates.
...when purchased items don't show up in the content library regardless of updating metadata and reinstalling them...
The best solution is external hard drives. no need to move anything. just start another/new content folder. you can add the new drive to daz once you open the daz software just go to edit preference content management and add your new drives from there, that way you never need to move anything, just keep adding new drives when you need to,or when you run out of roon. I am up to 5 - 2 TB external HHD drives . you may need to buy a USB hub for connecting the external HHD though
Been there. No issues so far, thankfully.
I went that route at one point, but that got to be a speed and transportation issue. Since I do most of my composing on a laptop, it's a lot easier to have things internal. Crucial had 1 TB M2 SSDs for $130. My laptop had four empty SSD slots, so I picked up two.
They installed and set up like a charm. Still have one slot empty, but its questionable as to if that one is fully functional. (I've found conflicting information online in that respect.)
In any case, it's nice to have all my content installed on SSDs. DS responds noticably quicker.
I still have my SSD as my primary drive. I just found using external hard drives on USB3.0 is fast reliable and I can separate my older content from my new content on there own indurvidual drives. so I don't need to keep my drive running all the time that contains my older generation 4 content.
I also use a lap top and 2 desk top PC's and i found I can move from lap top to desk top by just saving my scene and moving to which ever device i am working on and connecting to the HHD
Sometimes I'll render animation on my desk top, while I am working on my laptop setting up the next scene to be render for the animations . sharing the same HHD through my USB3 hub. so I can connect many devices ,
& for managing my content is by far the best solution for me specially if your using more than one device to access your content drive. and best thing is much easier for backing up your content incase your system crashes, really great solution if your animator
That makes sense and I may do that in the future. I am extremely paranoid about portable, non-SSD drives. With my luck, I would start on a week long trip and the HD would crash on me on day one.
SSDs were really the only way to go and an external SSD was the same or more than the internal ones I got. I figured that even if the laptop dies on me, I should still be able to pull the SSDs and put them into simple external enclosures. Or move them to the new computer.
My DAZ Collection is getting toi the point that it is already on a 2nd internal D: drive at 2TB but since I save both the installed library & the installer files on the same disk that is getting to be about 50% of my 2TB HDD.
It was only a suggestion . SSD does not help make your machine render faster so there is no benefit to SSD as a storage standpoint its to costly for storage .SSD just helps with faster system start up , quicker system searches and loads software & your content faster, that is why its used for a system main drive. The rendering is really a CPU or GPU device resource not drive. So once your content is loaded into a scene it does not really matter if its on SSD ot HDD for rendering, either with iray or 3dl..because the rendering is relied on by the systems gpu or cpu. But as a storage stand point HDD are much cheaper than SSD. you can get them in large storage sizes. I use a 5tb HHD just for daily shadow backups using a windows server to blast my backs ups before shut down.
But. like i said if your animator, or someone that is a 3d content hoarder then HDD external drives connected through USb 3 are the best way to go by far. But heck I also use external GPU cases to stack 980ti graphic cards in using USB3 to connect them to the main system. so to each is own.,
The speed increase I saw was more to do with DS start up, library navigation, and adding assets to the scene. My system was already booting from a SSD, but I had to store and run DS from the internal HDD. As the space ran out, there was a noticable degredation in DS responsiveness. All of that disappeared when I reinstalled DS and my content to the SSD.
I am expecting a small uptick in rendering, but really only for the initial set up of the rendering. I expect the render time to otherwise remain the same.
Yours is a good suggestion, particularly being able to shift from laptop to desktop quickly, which is something I currently do using Content Gatherer. This can be a bit cumbersome, but does work for the most part.
My adversion to external drives has more to do with my own paranoia and expectation that *something* will go wrong. Crashed HDDs, breaking one of my USB ports, breaking the port on the HDD, etc. etc.
It might seem like crazy paranoia talk, but it doesnt if you've experienced one of these while on a trip. It's happened to me twice and both times were incredibly frustrating.
In one instance, I was talking an online course and had to go overseas. I thought I had everything set up and foulproofed. Then when I got to my hotel, after having worked on a paper on the plane, I found that one of my USB sticks had jammed itself into my network port. Purely in a freak set of coincidences. It was a mad panic to figure out how to get online to upload the paper before the deadline.
Another instance where my software decided the perfect time to force updates was when I was completely out of conntectivity. Or the time that I found that my laptop drew more power than any of the available outlets could provide, tripping circuit breakers repeatedly....
I did do one thing that was smart. After my last DS crash I redownloaded all of my DIM content to an external drive. Which made it a thousand times easier to reinstall. Had I not done that, the reinstall would have taken days instead of 16 hours.
No problem with that here since I install everything manually and don't use DIM, Smart Contant or metadata
...when you look at something in the real world and think "Oh, I could buy that for G3M and use it in that scene... oh, wait"