This might be a tad OT... but try to stick with me.... I use an HP pavilion notebook as my primary computer. I work as a freelance consultant, so a notebook is really the only way to go for me. I bought mine last year needing lots of horse power for work, so it was pretty bleeding edge at the time (3.2 Ghz HT P4, 768 MB ram). I'm running out of hard drive space between work and Poser files. I know the main bottle neck in my machine is the hard drive anyway (80GB, 5200 RPM). Problem is, there aren't many options in the 7200 RPM range that are an upgrade in terms of space. Both my work and hobby use would defiantly benefit from a faster HD, but if the best I can do is a slight bump in space... I'm not sure it makes sense to spend 300 bucks to upgrade. So I'm thinking about an external drive. That would be relatively cheep and allow me to bide my time until I either buy a new machine or 100 gig plus 7200 internal drives become available. I could banish my huge Poser files to the external drive and have all the room I need. Question is, will rendering be obscenely slow from an external drive? I can do USB 2.0, and Iomega has an 80GB 7200 RPM drive for less than 80 bucks. But I've never used an external before when speed was an issue. I'm sure external to internal speeds are not an apples to apples comparison, but does anyone know how fast a 7200 external will be compared to an internal 5200? I'm defiantly going to get a little more RAM, but do you guys think it's worth the money to even TRY to render from an external HD?

No, it won't be obscenely slow. I have all my runtimes on an external drive. Poser itself is still on my C drive, but I moved the runtimes to drive M:, which is an external hooked up to a USB 2.0 port. Didn't notice any slowdown.

Well, rendering time will depend on the speed of the hard drive and the speed of the connection to the computer. A USB 2.0 port is pretty fast, but you might even want to think about a Firewire port. Also, you can now get 10,000 RPM (and even faster) hard drives.

I know Firewire is supposed to be faster than USB, but I haven't noticed any difference at all. I have lots of both (computer came with 8 USB 2.0 and 5 Firewire ports), and use them pretty much interchangeably.

You won't be rendering from that drive anyway. When you render, Poser uses your RAM and your swap file (located on your primary disk, unless you changed it.) If you are looking to get your poser files off the main disk, go for size on the external. Just give yourself the space to save all that you want to keep, and don't worry about the speed. If you can bump the RAM up to 1GB, you will be in better shape. You have a fast CPU already, with the gig of RAM (not more, since it seems from all conversations that Poser ignores more than a gig,) you should see a decent speed increase. Hope this helps!

@destro75 lol, of course- doh!

I have all my runtimes on an external and it really doesn't make much of a difference.

Sweet, I'm defiantly doing the RAM upgrade for my work application, which is a high end mapping and spatial analysis package that cost more than my computer itself=/. But it sounds like from what you guys are saying going external is worth it as well. Is there a good utility to use for managing the migration and ongoing library maintenance? I've used a text editor to change some references before... but surely there is something made for that purpose that is a little more automated.

If you're using Poser 5 or 6 you can simply link to that runtime on the external harddisk. Poser doesn't care WHERE it is, as long as it knows where to look :o) You could simply copy the whole existing runtime over if you wanted and empty whatever was on the main harddisk.

I think i read somwhere that USB 2 means it can access the external drive nearly as fast as an internal, and firewire a little faster than the usb2, its a vague memory though so don't quote me ;o).......I used poser on an external drive for a while, it was firewire and usb and it seemed to run fine, no noticable slow down and no real noticeable difference between the firewire and usb, but, noise was a real issue, the drive was an alloy one with a fan and it drove me mad, the plastic one was a little better but still to noisy so in the end i moved poser back to the internal and i do regular housekeeping using the external drives to store files as the internal drive is only 60gb....since then i've removed the fans from the drives and they seem to run fine so i may try it again.....another bonus is when you format the pc you can just drag your whole poser folder over to the external drive so its ready when format is done to drag back.....Steve

I have several external hard drives. No problems here.

The sound of fans don't bother me. In fact -- I like white noise.

Good thing, too. It's tough to have computer equipment (especially racks) without fans constantly running in the background.

I have Poser and my runtimes installed on an external USB 2.0 160 GB hard drive. It works just fine and fast.

Currently most power users opt for SATA. It has as much to do with availability and perceptions as hard figures. Comparison between technologies is a more difficult question than you'd think. It seems every manufacturer exaggerates their specs. Also there are many variables beyond the actual standards, such as buffer, rpm, bus type, and drive configuration. USB2.0 specs have an absurd maximum throughput of 480MB/sec, where 30MB/sec is more realistic. The same with IDE, a maximum of 133MB/sec is supposed to be possible, but 40MB/sec is more realistic. Ditto with SATA, an absurb maximum of 6,100MB/sec, but 58 is more realistic. As I mentioned SATA is the current best selling technology for power users.

The theoretical maximum speed of USB2.0 is slightly higher than the maximum of standard FireWire (480 Mbit/s vs 400 Mbit/s) I have used an external hard disk both over USB2.0 and over FireWire (same drive, same PC). FireWire was slightly faster, mainly in access time, throughput was about the same. I guess this had to do with the fact that I also used an USB mouse and keyboard on that PC, and it didn't have separate hubs. When I used this same drive as an internal one, its speed was marginally higher - again, the average access time was somewhat better, while the throughput was exactly the same. No reason not to install your whole Poser kaboodle on that external drive.

The only problem I've had with using an external drive for runtimes is that if that drive isn't plugged in when you start Poser, it drops all the runtimes on the drive and you have to reconnect them.

I have some Poser stuffs on an external Maxtor 300GB HD...it's quiet as a mouse and no troubles at all :)

Something about those specs: 133 MB/sec is the maximum that the ATA bus can transport. The maximum sequential read speed using the internal drive cache that modern hard drives can reach now exceeds 100 MB/sec. So you'd say that those 133 MB/sec are more than enough to transport the data to memory. Except for the fact that you can connect two drives to a single ATA133 slot. And those two drives then have to share the 133 MB/sec. SATA 1 is specified at 150 MB/sec, and only a single drive can be connected. SATA II is specified at 300 MB/sec, which seems a bit overdone, unless you include the larger drive caches (16 MB is not unusual anymore, and 32 MB cache is just around the corner) in the calculations. The 6,100 MB/sec kenyarb mentions is the speed of HyperTransport, the internal processor bus of the Athon64. SATA speed can be upped quite a bit from the current 300 MB/sec, serial technology allows higher speeds than parallel.

The only problem I've had with using an external drive for runtimes is that if that drive isn't plugged in when you start Poser, it drops all the runtimes on the drive and you have to reconnect them.

Yes, that is kind of a pain. My Western Digital external almost never drops off, but my Maxtor does, quite often. It's just random. Sometimes when I turn the computer on, the Maxtor external doesn't show up. Sometimes it just drops off randomly. Turning it on and off again fixes the problem, but if I don't realize it's dropped off, and start Poser, I have to reconnect all the runtimes.

I've gotten in the habit of only hooking up the runtimes I need, though, so it's not a huge inconvenience for me. I'm always adding and removing runtimes anyway.

Though it would be nice if you could arrange your runtimes in Poser. Or even if they automatically alphabetized or something.

Hmmm. It should be possible to write a Python script to do just that. Though I don't know for sure how Poser uses the libraryprefs.xml file. If it's only read during Poser startup, that Python script will be useless. Time to do some experiments.

Now that would be useful. Even if it's only read on startup, it would be useful, IMO. Since you pretty much have to restart Poser regularly anyway, due to memory issues.

Did the experiments. I started P5 (3 external runtimes), deleted one external runtime from libraryprefs using a text editor, but Poser didn't realize it. So the idea doesn't work.

Oh, and about ignoring memory more than 1 GB, that's not true. Most of my renders cause Poser to use 1.3-1.8 GB of physical memory. I've got 4 GB RAM.

Just like everyone here I use an external HD with a firewire connection. I don't notice any slow down and it's the way to go if you are running out of room. Adrian

Did some more experiments with libraryprefs.xml Depending on your Poser preferences (mine are set to save the current layout) the libraryprefs.xml gets overwritten when you quit Poser. So changing the settings using Python from within Posr does not work, unless you save the changes and then mark the file as read-only. This will also allow for another wish: "freeze" the startup runtime. I tested; it works. Problem is that you can't add a runtime permanently when libraryprefs.xml is read-only. The added runtime will only be present during the current session. It's not possible to hook into the Poser menus and add your own processing, alas. The only applications where it's possible to do so without a sneaky external C program that hooks into Windows itself (at least that I know of) are the MS Office apps and the MS development tools.

I use a USB 2.0 External Hard drive.

My problem with the external drive being turned on is that sometimes the computer will freeze if you try to turn it on with the external USB drive turned on, so I'd got into the habit of turning the drive off at the end of a session.

The maximum figure of 6,100 MB/sec for SATA is for a projected extension I saw scheduled for 2007. Of course, it's totally unrealistic. Most of these technology specs tend to give very optimisitic, or even unrealistic, figures. They should include a statement like "your mileage may vary."

I read this stuff about the external runtimes. I would like to minimize the poser startup time and use mutliple (different) runtimes. I experimented with some batch files copying libraryprefs and starting poser, but i do not get the whole idea. Sometimes it seems it does not work. Does anyone has any idea's what the best solution should be? TIA

I am using an external HD with a full P6 installation. OK, its a little bit slower than an internal drive but USB 2.0 is OK. The best thing to speed Poser up is to put all the stuff that is used seldom or never into the download directory to keep the number of rsr's and png's as small as possible. When I go to an other PC, I can plug in my USB Drive and can stat working. Ulli

I am using an external HD with a full P6 installation. OK, its a little bit slower than an internal drive but USB 2.0 is OK. The best thing to speed Poser up is to put all the stuff that is used seldom or never into the download directory to keep the number of rsr's and png's as small as possible. When I go to an other PC, I can plug in my USB Drive and can start working. Ulli