Running from USB External Device
Shessar
🖼️ 33 images Surveyor
I bought a new laptop a few months ago and finally have everything reinstalled and all of my files transferred from the old drive. The SSD on this is pretty small and almost out of space already. I don't want to switch it out for a bigger drive until the warranty has expired so was wondering if anyone has had luck running CC3+ with files from the data directory on an external drive (or USB stick)? Any problems or drawbacks to doing this that you know of?
Comments
From a technical standpoint, there shouldn't be any issues, as long as you make sure that external drive gets the same drive letter every time, if that ever changes, CC3+ will give errors on startup, and won't be able to find menu files or anything.
From a performance point, loading files over USB is slower. Now, CC3+ does caching, and things like computing effects doesn't load files by itself, but for example zooming may require higher resolution files to be loaded, which will be a performance hit.
As for performance, and external drive is far faster than a USB stick (assuming said external drive is an SSD, but you get some nice external drives that almost looks like a large USB stick, but with a M2 drive inside, and these are quite fast.
Windows also have different caching modes. If you set your drive to use a memory cache, performance will be better, but it is very important that you don't just yank it out in that case, but use the "safe removal" option like you always had to do in the old days. Windows switched to uncached writes a while back (at least for USB sticks, I actually don't remember the defaults for external drives) because people always forgot the safe removal thing, and corrupted their drives because they though they could remove them once the copy dialog was done, but this does mean worse performance and should really be enabled on an external drive you actually work on.
Thanks Remy. Very helpful!
I think I'll keep CC3+ on the internal drive after all and uninstall some of my less used software and keep most of my other files on the external drive. I really want to get back to mapping and performance issues would discourage me from that.
Hey that's great news Shessar! I really miss your maps :)
Thanks Sue! I've been quite busy babysitting a little dragon. Now that there's a new hatchling on the way I felt that I'd better figure out how to balance my personal interests with those of my little grand dragons. Time to teach the little one that my computer is not his toy. 😃