External hard drive for content?
Riggswolfe
Posts: 913
in The Commons
So, my current drive is getting full. I was thinking about getting an external drive but wanted feedback. Most of them seem to be USB. Does this make scenes slow to load? Has anyone done this for their DIM content? On a related note, can I move my DIM content without having to redownload it all?
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I use a HDD via USB 3.0 for both DIM and non-Daz store products.
Is it slow? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not really looking for speed? The priority is to keep the internal drives free for computer games.
I think you can just point Daz to where you move it, if you move it.
I have never tried an external HD for content, but I have tried putting my content on an SSD. In terms of loading characters and scenes, I didn't notice any difference so I went back to the bigger (and cheaper) HDD. Most of the loading time for a scene seems to be processor and RAM based, so I would imagine that in having your content on an external HDD you wouldn't notice any speed difference.
I keep my content on an internal HDD and back up to an external drive. Get an external drive by all means, but I've had them, as well as internal drives fail on me, and wouldn't want to rely on only one of the two. Right now, I'm even in the market for a cloud backup.
I recently had to move all my content to a 6TB external USB3 hard drivee after having it stored on a internal 3 TB RAID 5 array. Needless to say, I've seen a noticeable slowdown, especially when loading figures (which is partaill because I have several hundred commercial G3f and G8F characters), so when I get the time I'm probably going to buy the biggest internal SSD I can and move most of the most-used content onto that.
My content has been kept on externals since Poser 7. I've never had any issue with speed or load times.
Thank you for the feedback everyone. I have an internal 2tb drive that is dedicated almost exclusively to Daz. It's now down to 80gb so I am going to have to start looking at other options!
I meant to reply to this. That works great for manual content libraries. But for the DIMM library that downloads to a public document folder I'm not sure how to move it then "tell" DIMM I already have the content so it doesn't need to download it all over again. I ran into this when I switched to a new computer but don't remember how I fixed it anymore.
Here's the video that I learned how to move content from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8eiIhiSAcs
About external drives, you will pay a price premium for USB 3 ones but they are much faster transfering data than USB 2.
I use a fast internal 4T, with background sync to an external 4T on one system, a fast internal 4T with a background sync to the NAS on the other.
Basically, unless the stuff blows up during a content library update, I'm golden, and even then the loss is minimal, a few minutes to resync.
Do they even make USB 2 external drives any more? I just put 3 USB-C externals on line.
Fun fact. If you take off the casing of an external drive you can put it in your PC assuming your PC has room for it.
I believe Sata is faster than USB 3 so it would be a bit faster to have in in the PC, but I doubt it's enough to make a major difference.
If you have room for a large capacity 3.5" drive in your system, yeah those should fulfill your Daz needs for a while. I installed a 8 TB drive in my current setup that I use for full Daz folder backups, and may do something along those lines for my new Threadripper rendering system when 7nm Threadrippers hit the market.
I've seen it recommended a few times now to NOT install Daz stuff on the C: partition. There have been a few people that had issues with the Windows Updates messing things up, and in some rare cases the update process actually deleting the Daz stuff from the relevent Documents folder. The case I'm specifically thinking of the guy eventually found the files in a temp folder that Windows Update created to temporarily cache the files in the event of an update going wrong, so all was not lost in his case, but that was a couple of days of hell for that person.
Anyways, yeah by at least going with a separate partition, or preferably an entirely different drive for your Daz stuff, well it'll help protect you a bit against OS drive weirdness, and if it's a separate drive, it makes transplating your Daz install to a new computer that much easier.
I'm sure they do. Checking Amazon there are lots for sale.
I use a 4TB 7200 internal hard drive purely for content exactly because an external would be slow. It is backed up to a 4TB 5400 external drive as speed is not an issue on backup.
I have my DIM installation folder on an external 4 TB drive. I would go for 7200 RPM drives for externals and at least USB 3. I just purchased a 10 TB drive to replace my 8 TB backup drive and will use the 8 TB to replace one of the 3 TB drives that I use for external storage for other stuff.
I recommend them.
I was scared as hell to do this, but all my Daz content was completely stretching the time-space fibres of my internal drive. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the files to 5TB drive because it keeps the file structure exactly as you have it in your Daz files. It was remarkably easy to do, and once I changed the paths from the DIM and Daz it worked seamlessly.
Having your DAZ content on an external drive is easy to do and works fine. I've used both HDDs and SSDs for this purpose without problems.
I wouldn't obsess too much about speed. I suspect that when you load content into DAZ -- or even just scroll through your library -- the big bottleneck isn't how fast you can pull data off the drive, but how fast DAZ Studio can load it and display it (which is probably mostly a function of CPU speed). Even if drive speed does make a small difference, the actual loading phase probably takes up a small fraction of the time you spend working with DAZ Studio. Cutting that time by 10% by buying the fastest drive you can find isn't really going to change your life. Sure, get yourself a nice newish USB 3.0 drive (assuming your computer has a USB 3.0 interface) but don't go crazy trying to get the fastest possible drive.
I don't have hard numbers on this, but based solely on my own experience, I haven't noticed giant differences between different drive types for this task.
Is there any way to move "My DAZ 3D Library" file from here "C:\Users\Public\Documents\My DAZ 3D Library" to a different drive? Like my F drive? I don't want it on my C drive at all. It takes up too much space.
You can move it by telling DIMM to install to a different directory. The real trick is DIMM not trying to redownload all the stuff you've already downloaded.
I have a 1TB nVME, and it is alot quicker then a barracuda 7200 HDD, with the folder compressed or not, there is a big difference, but then Daz messing up loading times by deleting object's from an empty scene for 10 minutes
you will notice, if you have a charector, with 40 different item's of clothe's you can hide and show, so you don't have to keep loading those all the time