Running Daz Studio - SSD, M.2, HDD Question

DopeFusion

I have Daz Studio installed on my C:\ drive, a 1 TB M.2 SSD, and all of the content in one library on the D:\ drive, a 4 TB HDD. I picked up a 4 TB M.2 SSD on a Black Friday deal, installed it, moved all of my content to the new SSD, and remapped the paths in the Daz Studio application. I expected to see quite a boost in speed in loading characters, yet that is not the case. Even though both drives are SSDs (and both are WD_Black SN850X drives, just different storage sizes), I'm wondering if there is latency because the program is on one drive and the content on another. Any hardware junkies out there know how this stuff works under the hood? Would I get better speeds if I moved the Daz Studio application to the same drive as the content?

Chezjuan

I think that the speed of loading characters is dictated more by the number of things that Daz Studio has to load into RAM as opposed to the raw speed of the drive. If you have a lot of characters and custom morphs for a generation (e.g. Genesis 8.1), then Daz Studio loads all the morphs associated with the generation, and that is a lot of small files being read from multiple locations (random read). While the SSD reads them quickly, the system has to process the files and load them into RAM, which is where the bottleneck occurs. I don't think the location factors into it.

Loading aside, with my extensive library I do notice that scrolling through Smart Content is faster since the SSD does read a lot faster. Not earth shaking because they're small files, but it is noticable.

 

Richard Haseltine

A major contribution to load time for most figures is building the list of links between properties.

DopeFusion

Thank you, both, for your quick replies! Much appreciated!

placentafloor

Try out turbo loader software in Daz, many people have said how good that is for quicker load times, especially when they have so many morphs installed. Alternatively if you are struggling with load times as you have so many assets and morphs installed. Another option is to delete all these assets from Daz and only use a select handful at a time. Keeping the majority of content on a separate path on the m.2 drive and only using what you need at certain times. In my view RAM and CPU are the biggest bottlenecks for Daz studio, M.2 generations are minimal for the advantage they achieve. Having a CPU like 5950x or 7950x with a WD Green 1TB HDD and 64gb RAM, will be much better compared to say a 7600x CPU, 32gb RAM and M.2 gen 4 drive.