My Hard Drive is too small

Johnny Rico

I have a dilemma.

I use a laptop for my Daz rendering.

It is a high end laptop but it has a small SSD.

I am running out of space on my hard drive (and DAZ material can take up a lot of space).

Replacing the laptop or replacing the hard drive for a larger one at this time is not an option.

So...I'm wondering what my options are.
Has anyone else experienced this issue?
Is is possible to have part of your DAZ products on an external hard drive and part of your products in your main internal drive files?
Is is possible to have your DAZ products on a cloud service (less preferred - also does this affect DAZ speed performance)?

If anyone has a good solution to my conundrum it would be greatly appreciated :)

Vhardamis

Grab a TB external drive when they go on sale and store all your DAZ content on it. All of my content is on an external drive and it works the same as when I had it on the main HD. The beauty of storing it on an external like that is portability. I can hook it up to my normal desktop pc or my laptop.

I have heard other folks experiencing a bit of lag between the HD and D|S and some freezes but I've never had an issue with it. Best I can suggest for that is be sure you have like to like: a 2.0 usb drive to a 2.0 Mb or a 3.0 usb drive to a 3.0 MB.

Edited to add: Just make sure you point D|S to the new / correct installation path so you can see said content.

Steven-V

Argh! Just this exact thing happened to me because of the default install paths.

Ideally, you should not be installing your DAZ content library onto your small SSD. I assume that is your "c" drive. That drive should be used for applications only... not data files. Data files go on your HDD, not your SSD. Usually the HDD is much larger. For instance, I have 256 GB of SSD space and 1 TB of HDD space on my new laptop. Unfortunately, DAZ by default, just like ALL windows programs, likes to put everything on the C:\ drive.

The thing to do here is to move your DAZ3D content library onto your D drive somewhere. So the drive called "My DAZ3D Library" needs to be moved to your HDD and off the SSD.

Also, watch out for what DAZ is putting in your Users directory. It likes to put stuff in Users/Public for example, and also in your Users//AppData folder. (On a personal note of annoyance I wish no programs would EVER put stuff in there -- I hate it when they do).

And finally watch out where it is putting downloads if you are keeping and not purging those.

In DIM, Make sure in your settings that downloaded files go into D:\Downloads\DAZ or something... In the installation tab make sure that you are installing content into a folder on the D drive, e.g., D:\Applications\My DAZ 3D Library. If you have not been installing things there, I suggest moving them. You may end up with some broken links and have to rebuild your database.

I really wish programs would stop defaulting to C:\ and at least ASK the user... I mean at least when we do a "custom install" it should ask us. But most programs don't... sadly.

mjc1016

steven.viscido said:

I really wish programs would stop defaulting to C:\ and at least ASK the user... I mean at least when we do a "custom install" it should ask us. But most programs don't... sadly.

It's collusion, I'm sure of it...the makers of install software are getting kickbacks from drive manufacturers...

Steven-V

Heheh.

I think most of it is just the grandfather clause of laziness... Programs were all installed on c:\ back in DOS and Windows 3.1 and 95 days, and everyone has just kept it that way, in perpetuity, rather than changing it to something more reasonable. Even Windows 8.1 is obscenely stupid about where it installs documents by default. You can easily move things like your documents library off of c:, but moving the Users folder can cause all manner of trouble, and you have to ask why... why is it hard-coded into so many things to assume c:\users?

But I guess I come from a linux mentality where the /home partition (equivalent to Users) can be anywhere, as long as you tell the OS where.

mjc1016

steven.viscido said:

Heheh.

I think most of it is just the grandfather clause of laziness... Programs were all installed on c:\ back in DOS and Windows 3.1 and 95 days, and everyone has just kept it that way, in perpetuity, rather than changing it to something more reasonable. Even Windows 8.1 is obscenely stupid about where it installs documents by default. You can easily move things like your documents library off of c:, but moving the Users folder can cause all manner of trouble, and you have to ask why... why is it hard-coded into so many things to assume c:\users?

But I guess I come from a linux mentality where the /home partition (equivalent to Users) can be anywhere, as long as you tell the OS where.

Slackware...forever...

And, in reality it doesn't even have to be named /home...or in the same building...or anything...but if you do have it on a networked location, you'd better make sure the network is UP before you log in.

Johnny Rico

Thank steven.viscido and Vhardamis for the the info. It is really helpful!

Unfortunately, my laptop has ONLY one drive (the small SSD drive), so it sounds like I can do all of these items with and external hard drive?

Just to make sure I understand the steps, I need to:

1. Connect the external hard drive - this step should be easy :)

2. Transfer the file entitled “My DAZ3D Library” from the C: drive to the external hard drive

3. Point DAZ to the new location where the content is located on the external hard drive (I'm guessing this edit occurs in the Content Directory Manager?)

4. Go into DIM and change the installation path to the new location of the “My DAZ3D Library”

Is this everything? Also, a couple of other questions:

A) If I understood correctly, you mentioned that this process might result in some broken links and I might have to rebuild my database. Is that hard to do? Or is it likely unnecessary if I follow the steps above?

B) With my content on a external HDD, will I notice a significant change in speed when working with loading content in DAZ?

Thanks again for helping me with this :)

Vhardamis

rusty9073 said:

Thank steven.viscido and Vhardamis for the the info. It is really helpful!

Unfortunately, my laptop has ONLY one drive (the small SSD drive), so it sounds like I can do all of these items with and external hard drive?

Just to make sure I understand the steps, I need to:

1. Connect the external hard drive - this step should be easy :)

2. Transfer the file entitled “My DAZ3D Library” from the C: drive to the external hard drive

3. Point DAZ to the new location where the content is located on the external hard drive (I'm guessing this edit occurs in the Content Directory Manager?)

4. Go into DIM and change the installation path to the new location of the “My DAZ3D Library”

Is this everything? Also, a couple of other questions:

A) If I understood correctly, you mentioned that this process might result in some broken links and I might have to rebuild my database. Is that hard to do? Or is it likely unnecessary if I follow the steps above?

B) With my content on a external HDD, will I notice a significant change in speed when working with loading content in DAZ?

Thanks again for helping me with this :)

Yes there might be some meta data issues after moving the Db to the external. If your content no longer shows under the smart tab and you just get the yellow triangle of doom you'll need to clear and re download just the meta data through the D|S interface itself NOT DIM.