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Freeing Up Disk Space

Anhedonia_79Anhedonia_79 Posts: 6
edited December 1969 in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Since DAZ just has to offer tons of awesomely cool stuff (and I'm weak and cannot help but to buy all of this stuff) I have found that my computer's hard drive is near to full. I am curious to know if there is a way to place the majority of my DAZ content onto an external hard drive while keeping some basic stuff on my computer (and then of course having them work together without much hassle or issue when I need extra content not stored on my computer's hard drive). I am not tech/computer savy in the slightest so this may either be an easy fix or perhaps an impossible request (I don't know). But I know that the DAZ community is full of helpful tech-savy individuals who do, so I am appealing to you all. Please help me liberate my computer's hard drive.

Anhedonia_79

Comments

  • JimmyC_2009JimmyC_2009 Posts: 8,891
    edited December 1969

    You can install DAZ 3D Content on an external HDD, and give DS the path to it, and it will work the same as the internal one. They are fairly cheap at the moment too.

    I believe that you can even use a SSD card too, although I have never tried it, and it may be more expensive to get the space you need.

  • Anhedonia_79Anhedonia_79 Posts: 6
    edited December 1969

    Thanks JimmyC_2009, I figured that this was totally possible. However, because I am not up to speed on the technical side of things here, I was curious if you could suggest to me how to "...give DS the path to it..."? I assume that this is something done within DS while it is open? Sorry to be such a bother, but I'm the kind of guy that the Install Manager was made for (the guy who can't figure out how to install content, etc. except for the idiot-proof way - by letting the computer tell me where to put things). I do very much appreciate your help on this though.

    And I actually already have a couple of good external hard drives so all I need to do is to figure out how to put the content there and to let DS know to look there. Again, thanks a million (or a few GB's).

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167
    edited March 2013

    Depending on what type of external HD you plan to use (e.g. USB 2.0 vs SATA 3GB/s) you can expect a noticeable speed loss in accessing your runtime/content, loading files and saving files. If you have photos, music and videos those do far better if you store them externally to free up space. Also if you use Reality and/or Luxus your save files are going to be close to or well over a gigabyte for each project, those you can store on externals with less serious impact.

    my internal secondary HD is set up like this
    Runtime (H:) [and it could be anything, "H:" just happens to be that drive]
    Studio folder
    ....Studio/Data
    ....Studio/Content
    ....Studio/Content/Runtime

    In the preferences tab I map the Daz Studio content to
    H:/Studio
    it automatically finds my studio content

    and I map the Poser content to
    H:/Studio/Content
    it automatically finds my poser content and knows how to use it

    since my data file (the biggest space hog of them all) is on that drive I keep the H:/content as my only item in those lists because I want all my data centralized so when I go to back up I have one place I need to look.

    likely you may have additional files in your C:/users/your account/documents/Daz3d/....
    you can keep those as well or move everything over.

    having everything but the application on one HD will also help with your computer caching (reading and writing to the boot drive) which even with 256GB of RAM it still caches. Since your not accessing your data on that drive it will speed things up as well.


    Yes this is the mac version, I had to slap this together with Photoshop but it should end up looking something like this on Windows

    pref.jpg
    867 x 615 - 118K
    Post edited by StratDragon on
  • KeryaKerya Posts: 10,943
    edited December 1969

    I would go with a second internal harddrive - it is faster than an external one.

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167
    edited December 1969

    It's frustrating for a buyer since SATA is rated in MB/s and USB is rated in Mb/s. USB drives are generally SATA drives with USB controllers so you are not getting direct SATA speeds.

    SATA II speed is 300 MB/s
    USB 2 speed is 460 Mb/s (sounds faster, doesn't it?)
    the B in MB is bites, and the b in Mb is bytes so USB 2 speed is actually 60 MB/s or a little over 5x slower.

    Confused yet?

    Internal drives are usually very simple to install provided you case fits them, but if your computer as E-SATA or USB 3 or Thunderbolt or Firewire800 connectors you can get a faster than USB 2 external drive, just be prepared to pay from slightly more to incredibly more. USB 2 is still the most common drive used for externals for price and size, like I said great for pix and videos and luxrender data but runtime for me was unacceptable.

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