Working Off an External Hard Drive?
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Hi all. We’ve been working on some VR projects in 8K over the last month and are running out of space on our internal hard drives. (Currently, we use Dropbox for storage.)
My question is this: If we switched our Dropbox with all of our C4D files and assets etc from our internal drives to an external (let’s say a really fast SSD? Or RAID array?) will we see any speed loss in Cinema 4D? i.e. Will renders or simulations or viewport performance be slower vs working on an internal drive? Is the same true with Redshift, Octane, AE, Premiere, etc?
Also, do any of you have specific hard drives, set-ups, or other solutions that you’d recommend?
Thanks for your help!
-Ryan
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Hi Ryan,
I have no hardware suggestions here.
I assume I do not tell you anything new here:
Measure the speed you get from your internal SSD and what you get from an external SSD. The speed printed on a box is often not a practical value; you need to do that in your setup; anything else is unreliable. Besides that, the connection matters. It is not simple to tell how good each interface is. Thunderbolt 4 should give you plenty, but 8K tells very little. Is it raw, compressed, etc? When I capture 8K with my camera, that makes a huge difference. If you use Dropbox, it sounds like you have compressed data, but that is all guessing.
I would test a few drives and combinations. My setup here is purely SSD; some I bought promised speed and typically provide 70% of that. Some are more in the 90%. Again, many factors and how your system is set up are involved.Perhaps a card that can hold memory is preferable. I saw solutions that allow for 26GB/s up to 64GB (OWC), which should allow for a few 8K streams.
Cinema 4D uses any speed if data needs to be loaded. But how much it is on the bottom line, again it depends.
A free speed measure is available from Black Magic Design.
My best wishes for your project
