Is anyone having troubles with an SSD Drive?
Ron Knights
Posts: 2,109
I recently decided to place my main DAZ Studio content onto a 2TB SSD drive.
I've been moving thousands of files. Sometimes the process slows down to a crawl. And I swear sometimes some files and folders go missing.
Maybe the SSD drives aren't meant for massively moving files?
I've moved my main content back over to a regular 3TB hard drive.
Post edited by Ron Knights on
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Not specific to an ssd drive, but I've had this happen when both drives were hooked to the same USB hub. Now I always connect one drive to the computer directly and the other to the USB hub.
In general I have no problems with internal or external SSD Drive. Most of my drives are SSD up to 8 TB. Also no problems with big files or large content. But some external SSD have a small "fast Cache" if this is full: it slows down and can take a while till you see everything "corret" in the Explorer etc. This may need some hours. Don't shut of the drive meanwhile! Then you have corrupt data = like your missing files and folders.
I have only two of this external SSD and I replace them with other drives. As example Crucial X6 4TB is one of this drives. I will never buy that again.
I have a small library compared to most (a little under 2.1k), and I transferred everything to an external SSD. Ever since then, I tend to experience slowdown with Daz Studio, where it freezes for a moment, takes about 15 seconds or so to catch up, and then I'm good. There's no rhyme or reason for what I'm doing, what kinds of products either. I expect it to take some time to load the library options, but even when just in texture mode, it just happens and I've just accepted that's the drawback of using the external SSD. I'm using less than half the size of the drive, and I think the slowdown comes from my PC reading it.
Anyway, is this what you're experiencing? If anyone has a solution to this, I'd love to know.
When the cache fills up performance with some drives drops off a cliff. I've had this happen on my less expensive SSD when trying to do exactly what you're doing.
The good news is that if you wait for it to do the transfer then performance will be in line with what you'd expect from an ssd when installing, loading and saving stuff.
I originally bought the SSD drive to replace the "regular" hard drive in an old notebook computer. I decided to buy a new notebook computer instead.
I've used an HP Envy desktop for my DAZ Studio work. The 500GB NVME drive died. I replaced it with a 1TB NVME drive.
I fumbled about inside the case, doing the replacement. Now, for some reason, I can't get any other internal drives to work.
I installed the 2TB SSD drive into an external case. It's plugged directly into a USB port on the computer.
I think the biggest problem comes when I'm working on a large amount of content.
For example, all my Genesis content is in its own folder (Runtime or collection).
I let DIM install the content. Then I make a copy of that folder. Then I move the "facing" files to get rid of "vanity" folders, and simplify the organization.
The Genesis folder is massive. It involved lots of work and moving files.
I think most poeple find a slowdown when copying lots of very small files (e.g. every product's preview image). If you copy a folder with a 500-megabyte video file, it copies one file and updates the directory once. If you copy a folder with a thousand 500k files, it still moves 500 megabyts of data but it's moving a thousand times as many files which means updating the directly 1000 times.
wsterdan, of course, you're right. That's a lot of work for a drive to handle.
But a good SSD (internal or external) will also do that much faster than a HDD.
Yeah, let's just say I already changed my strategy.
If you're interested, you can read my post about moving to an 8TB hard drive.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/731046/i-m-moving-my-daz-studio-content-to-an-8tb-drive#latest
If you have a quality name brand SSD you should be OK. However, be wary of cheap no-name, to-good-to-be-true prices, you might have a small capacity drive hacked to lie that it is a larger size drive. In which case writing to it would continue to work but would circle around at the end and start clobbering data at the beginning of the drive.
Been there, done that. But mostly that happens with cheap thumbdrives.
Another issue to think about is the external case. Depending on the quality, it may not do a good job of transfering/transforming the data from USB to SATA in a timely manner. Connecting the SSD drive internally, directly to a motherboard SATA connection would be the best choice, but external USB is OK, but with some loss of efficiency. And as others have mentioned, the amount of cache space in the SSD limits the quantity of data you can move at rated speed before it slows down significantly. And moving numerous small files is much slower than one big file, just because of the internal paperwork involved.
You can just say "hard drive". Hard drives, short for hard DISK drives, write to spinning disk, which SSDs, flash drives and other diskless storage formats don't have. This is also why, despite being rigid on the outside, the old 3.5" disks were still called "floppy": the disk INSIDE the casing was floppy.
HEAT can actually be a major issue with NVMe drives in an external enclosure. I don't know the best solutions for this but it's worth some research and maybe a different enclosure or one with thermal pads, integrated heatsinks, or even some kind of fan. There may be a way to monitor the heat and see if the drive starts getting slow above certain temps. Most enclosures are just a tight metal shell and some NVMe drives will throttle when they get hot under load.
My "Backup" is a external "ineo 2 bay external raid enclosure" with 2 Samsung 8 TB SSD - it works very well, fast and without any problems. (When i bought the SSD the price was half of the current price).