External HDD Getting Full

ajb47

Been away a bit because most of my renders were for my TTRPG groups and I had stopped playing. And now I'm in another group playing again (D&D5E, not that it matters), so I want to render some more.

I plugged in my external drive and out of curiosity I hit Properties and found out that I am using over 800GB on a 1TB drive. Now, it's true that I bought a lot of stuff that I have never really used. And I have a couple of 2TB externals sitting there, so my question is this (but I know which way I'm leaning, just trying to think through the options). Is it better to:

1) spend time removing old stuff I don't use and continue with the same hard drive? (Probably useless since I will just keep adding content and will need to do one of the other choices at some point.)

2) straight up copy the 800GB to a new 2TB drive (more likely than 1, but that's a lot of time for my laptop to copy stuff.)

3) just add a 2TB drive in another port and start installing there, using both drives? (I think this is best assuming I can just add another Content Directory in Daz? I think I can, but I haven't ever tried it. Downside is I will now have 2 external drives connected when rendering and will probably need to attach them in the same order each time? )

Thanks in advance for any thoughts and advice.

AJ Butterwick
 

Ninefold

Yeah, you can just add a second content directory. I'm not sure how people who use other installation methods go about this, but if you use DIM, just go to the installation tab of the advanced settings dialogue and click on the plus button at the bottom of the dialogue. Then select which library you want to install into and it's off to the races. DIM will tell DAZ Studio where your libraries are.

namffuak

One thing to do after adding the additional drive is to go into Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management and permanently assign drive letters to the drives - then it won't make any difference which order the get plugged in.

NorthOf45

Ninefold said:

Yeah, you can just add a second content directory. I'm not sure how people who use other installation methods go about this, but if you use DIM, just go to the installation tab of the advanced settings dialogue and click on the plus button at the bottom of the dialogue. Then select which library you want to install into and it's off to the races. DIM will tell DAZ Studio where your libraries are.

Not quite. DIM will install where you tell it to, but Studio must be configured to know where to look with Content Directory Manager. Add the new installation folders that you specified in DIM to the list in Studio, then you will be good to go. 

nonesuch00

What I did was copy my DIM download zip installers for DAZ products and that whole DIM directory & file structure of stuff onto one ext 2TB SSD and the actual installed Content Library of my DAZ products on another ext 2TB SSD, both 2TB SSDs have over a TB each free disk space so I should be good for a long good while. I only ever plugin the SSD containing the DIM DAZ 3D product install zip files when I have new DAZ products to download. And only plugin the Content Library SSD when I have new DAZ 3D products I've downloaded to install or am running DAZ Studio. Also, in the future with clean installs of your OS, for whatever reason, you'll find it much more straight forward, if still not exactly fast, to reinstall all your products again.

ajb47

namffuak said:

One thing to do after adding the additional drive is to go into Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management and permanently assign drive letters to the drives - then it won't make any difference which order the get plugged in.

 

Thanks for the steps. I was fairly sure I could do that, I just hadn't looked up the steps to take to get it done.

AJ

Richard Haseltine

NorthOf45 said:

Ninefold said:

Yeah, you can just add a second content directory. I'm not sure how people who use other installation methods go about this, but if you use DIM, just go to the installation tab of the advanced settings dialogue and click on the plus button at the bottom of the dialogue. Then select which library you want to install into and it's off to the races. DIM will tell DAZ Studio where your libraries are.

Not quite. DIM will install where you tell it to, but Studio must be configured to know where to look with Content Directory Manager. Add the new installation folders that you specified in DIM to the list in Studio, then you will be good to go. 

Actually, when Install manager installs it adds a script  to the runonce folder that is run on DS launch and checks that the folders DIM wrote to (for native files) are active, and asks what to do if they are not. Of coruse that may create issues if the wrong folder in the hierarchy has already been selected, and I seem tor ecall a few cases in the past on which a system/security tool was interfering with/removing any runonce scripts.

NorthOf45

Richard Haseltine said:

NorthOf45 said:

Ninefold said:

Yeah, you can just add a second content directory. I'm not sure how people who use other installation methods go about this, but if you use DIM, just go to the installation tab of the advanced settings dialogue and click on the plus button at the bottom of the dialogue. Then select which library you want to install into and it's off to the races. DIM will tell DAZ Studio where your libraries are.

Not quite. DIM will install where you tell it to, but Studio must be configured to know where to look with Content Directory Manager. Add the new installation folders that you specified in DIM to the list in Studio, then you will be good to go. 

Actually, when Install manager installs it adds a script  to the runonce folder that is run on DS launch and checks that the folders DIM wrote to (for native files) are active, and asks what to do if they are not. Of coruse that may create issues if the wrong folder in the hierarchy has already been selected, and I seem tor ecall a few cases in the past on which a system/security tool was interfering with/removing any runonce scripts.

Hm-m, never seen it, never heard of it. If you didn't know it existed, you would never know it was there, or when it actually worked. Ignorance can be bliss, sometimes.

nonesuch00

Speaking of changing drive letters in Windows so they keep the same drive letter between uses, I should tell you some people are returning new SSDs to resellers thinking they are defective but actually they just need to be initialized in Window's (or name your OS) Disk Management (or equivalent)'s utility. The Fikwot brand is an example.