SSD?
JQP
Posts: 512
I'm thinking about buying a 120gb SSD. I know I can buy them a lot bigger than that, but the price point of a 120 is the only reason I'm even considering buying.
My runtime is way to big to fit on that, so I was considering moving the content that would benefit most from being on an SSD, namely, people figures that take a long time to load, like G2/G3.
This sounds like it would be fairly straightforward matter of moving the appropriate folders in my library, the data folder, etc. I suppose I would need to install the base figures to their new location first, then copy the data folder from the previous installation. Add a new Daz content library first, obviously.
Am I missing something here? Some snag or problem that will make this a no-go? Because I'm not really interested in doing this if I have to reinstall every morph pack and character and etc. that I've already installed for these figures. And faster Daz load times (and image optimization, I'm hoping) is one of my main reasons for wanting an SSD. I don't really find myself wishing Windows would run a lot faster all that often, otherwise.
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Comments
All that aside, I'm probably not in the price point I thought I was. I saw like three 120gb SSDs on slickdeals for under $40 each, but now I see they're all SATA, and apparently I want an M.2 if I want to realize the full potential of an SSD. I see a 500gb 960 EVO for $200 but that's like 4x what I want to spend.
If your going from Mechanical to SSD you will still get speed increases of between 5 and 10 times, even via SATA!
The M.2 is just the name of the connector, and it could be connected by either SATA or NVME.
You'll have to check your motherboard specs. to see if your M.2 is actually NVME.
(NVME is the one thats 25 times faster than a mechanical drive.)
If you have not already got an SSD for the systerm drive, I would recommend that first. I've just replaced the system drive on one machine with a Samsung 950 EVO 250GB (SATA), everything was much, much faster.
I think having the page file and temp folders on an SSD has more impact than just increasing the content drive speed.
120GB is really-really small, I would advise against it. I'm saying this, having a 120GB SSD in my computer.
How long does it take to load figures? If it is more than a minute than something is wrong with your content libraries or CMS.
No you don't; an SSD none-M.2 will be very useful, although you could fit two different ones in there.
Personally 120GB is nowhere near big enough, even just for using as C drive. You might manage for a while, but it would fill quickly
Yeah I'm pretty sure it's a PCIe M.2 connection. I was reading a buying guide on SSDs last night and I saw mention of a 120gb NVME or whatever for like $70, I could probably justify the extra $30 for that big a performance boost. So I'm gonna have to run that down again (browser got closed accidentally).
Ati, I'd rather have something bigger, but I don't have the money right now. But I've been running Windows on a 100gb partition for the last 10 years at least, and I like it just fine. I've got 30tb or so of space on a lot of mechanical drives. I keep almost nothing on my system partition, other than OS and small programs (big installs like games and runtime go onto other partitions and drives). W10 freshly installed is like 27gb, leaving like 90gb for page file, hibernation file, and some select Daz Studio content and scenes. DS performance is the only thing I really care about. OS performance is nice, too, of course. But I don't game much, or use photoshop much, etc. Other than DS I mostly browse the web or play media files or write.
Jest, yes, it took like 3 minutes to load G3F on my old system (i5-4400k, 24gb DDR3, HDD). I loaded her once on my new system (i5-8400, 16gb DDR4, HDD) but didn't time it; it didn't seem much faster. And yes, she has issues. Lots of morphs, and apparently several are problematic (log spits out over a thousand errors IIRC). But I've googled the **** out of the errors the log spits at me and I got nothin. So I have no way to fix her. I did track down 3 problem products and removed them; that got me down from 4.5m to 3. But I've hit a wall. I'm not really interested in starting over again fresh, particularly since I'd be risking reinstalling the problem products, unless I made the install process twice as tedious as it would already be, by checking the log after each install (even checking after every 10 installs or whatever would make it a lot more tedious).
Edit: Not to mention the huge time suck of re-doing all the customizations I've done to my copy of G3F myself (I had to clone all her morphs to her hip node so I could sort them properly; my changes to the sorting of the morphs in the root node were reverting in a particularly obnoxious way). Saving these customizations is SLOOOOOOOOW. 'Course it might be a lot faster on an SSD...
Actually, on second thought, I probably will do a fresh, second install of G3F on the SSD, while keeping the old one on the HDD. I can just go at my own pace, rather than try to get everything done at once, so it doesn't turn into a slog. I've noticed that almost all of the problems I had with DS 4.10 on W7 have disappeared since I installed W10, so maybe a lot of my problems sorting G3F's morphs will have disappeared, too. It's at least worth trying.
Slickdeals currently has this for $165:
XPG GAMMIX S10 PCIe 512 GB 3D NAND NVMe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 Solid State Drive - price: 164.99 - msrp: 279.99
If I could find something like that in 256gb for $85 I'd jump right on it. Maybe I'll just watch the deals until I see something I can't pass up.
My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z370P D3 r1.0. The specifications say:
Chipset:
1 x M.2 connector (Socket 3, M key, type 2242/2260/2280/22110 SATA and PCIe x4/x2 SSD support)
I assume if I buy a 2280 type SSD I'm good to go?
Pcpartpicker has a couple of 250+gb 2280s for like $85.
My motherboard has 6 SATA sockets. All 6 of them are currently occupied (5 HDDs and 1 DVD-RW). Just to be clear, if I want to install an NVMe SSD I won't have to unplug one of my SATA devices, and if I install an SATA SSD, I will have to unplug one of my SATA devices; correct? I just want to make sure I'm not giving points to NVMe, despite higher prices, for not consuming an SATA socket. I don't really have a clue as to how these devices are actually installed on the motherboard.
Part of going the M2 route is so that it does not take up a SATA port. It instead shares with the PCI-E lanes.
That 512GB for $160 sounds really good. Its a lot cheaper then what i paid for mine and I got 3 at the same time to do a RAID 5 array. My M2 SSD is a 480GB and was even more. The prices are better than before. With SSDs or HHDs, you can always get more storage for less if you go big. More so with HHDs
Amazon has 250gb 860 EVOs for $95, probably gonna go with that.
I just timed how long it took my new install of DS 4.10 and W10 to load G3F using my new system, and it's way faster; down to about 1m 10s, from over 3 minutes on my previous system.
If it helps, in the last few years I've probably run every possible SSD/HDD combination with DAZ. The most impact you are going to see is putting your OS on an SSD. Putting your DAZ files on an SSD will only help some for the initial load of the files, but I didn't see a major speed increase. I currently have my OS on one SSD, my Windows swap file on another, and my DAZ/Poser libraries on a hybrid SSHD, which is a mix of both, for good and bad. I have a high-end system, and even then the file loads can take longer than you'd think, especially if its having to grab many tiny files and then spend processing time parsing the file contents and building the scene file.
Tom, yes, that helps, thanks. Yeah I hadn't even thought about the fact that scene files saved on an SSD are probably gonna be grabbing a bunch of stuff saved on HDDs, anyway.
AFAIK you can't have the same assets multiple times in the content folders since this would generate "duplicated" errors.
...But you can have multiple references to the main files.
I have hair in a hair folder, and in a folder I use for regular items, the hairs I am currently using, along with other items.
Padone, I'll probably skip reinstalling G3F, now that she loads in just over a minute. Still not optimal, but it's a heck of a lot better than three minutes.
As for duplicate errors, I get those half the time anyway. On some content they seem to come and go, lol. One day the Daz guys will figure out to put all the requests for user input ("okay, I understand, duplicate errors, thx") AFTER everything has loaded, instead of sticking them in the middle of the loading process. Microsoft figured this out with file copying and Windows installs after about 30 years of making operating systems, so there's hope for Daz yet.