Hello all, I'm planning to move my multiple Poser runtimes from my PC's master drive to an external HD, but I have a couple of questions and hope you experienced folks can enlighten me on them:

1.   Does Poser runtimes run noticeably slower in an external HD with USB2 connection than in an internal SATA HD, when I run the Poser core application from an internal SATA drive?

2.   Does Poser run even slower  when I have the Poser core application and all the runtimes installed and run in an external HD with USB2 connection?

My computer is a Core 2 Duo, with a SATA master drive, 1.5G system RAM, 256MB dedicated video RAM.

Your input is much appreciated!

My input is this:   Internal drives are wired closer to the core than external drives are....   Even USB2..  firewire or what ever...    How slower will it run...?    It depends on the system..... 

calling up average size  images can be fast,,,  calling up large chucks of software is another thing...

I have run poser and stored all the Runtime stuff from an external drive since Poser 5 and never noticed a speed difference :-)

-Sarah

IIRC speeds are

USB 2.0 Interface ---> 150 to 300 MB per second depending on your PCI bus

SATA Interface ---> 1500 MB per second approx

Hard drive speed is above USB2, so yes, external USB2 drive is slower. You may not notice the difference however, as it will be affected by your other components and the nature of the data being copied.

However I'm worried that you have 1.5 GB of RAM. It's a weird amount. None of the "big boys" in computers (Dell, HP, etc) will ship a machine with a 1.5 GB in standard configuration as it'll cause some odd problems sometimes (mysterious crashes that people usually blame on Windows). Should have 1 GB or 2 GB.

My Poser application is on one of my internal SATA drives but all of my runtimes are out on a USB2 external hard drive and I've never noticed a slow down.  In fact, if anything, Poser loads and runs quicker because I load and off-load runtimes as I use them.

Running runtime folders or texture folder etc.. from an external drive is fine and a good Idea but running Poser from an external will be slower than internal....  

I've got my Runtimes on an external FW HD and there's no slowdown at all.

Thank you all for the inputs.    
I'll keep and run my Poser app from my internal SATA drive, and move all the additional runtimes to my external drive.

Also, thank you spacedragon1234 for bringing up the potential problem re:  my system RAM.
I just replaced one of my old 512M RAMs  with a new 1G RAM chip, so it's now 1.5G.  
So far so good, but I'm concerned about the potential problem that might arise in the future.

Has anybody here encountered any problem with a system RAM that's not 1G, 2G, or 4G?

Thanks!

The only problem AFAIK is that they wont run in dual channel mode (if your mobo supports it of course) So slower rendering and all that.

Thank you tekmonk for the info.   
Do you mean if my mobo supports dual channel mode, then two 512M RAM chips actually enable faster rendering than one 1G and one 512M RAM?

From what I've heard you're just always suppose to have matching chips.  Ive done something similar a long time ago though, a 256 and a 512.  It worked for a while for me - if I was you, Id call a local computer exchange store and see what they will give you for the 512 - you might be able to upgrade it to a 1g for pretty cheap.  Just make sure you bring your 1g chip with you when you go so you can make sure they match.

I use an External Seagate drive using a Sata connection and the speed is just like having an internal drive.  All my runtime folders are on that drive.  I build my own computers so I don't use IDE anymore.  I use Sata.  It's faster.
Adrian

I have 2 SATA drives in my machine; one for normal machine stuff & programs and the other for all my graphic arts programs, including my Runtimes and everything runs fast.  I do backup everything to an external drive though and I do notice a slower speed with it.  BTW, don't forget to plug it in when looking for stuff.

External drives will mean slower loading and saving. As for rendering I'm not sure it will matter all that much.

Drive speed matters during rendering when paging is necessary so the faster your internal system drive the better performance you will get when rendering big scenes. The location of the file (internal or external drive does not affect this process)

Systems with over 2gb of ram are of no real benefit to Poser as it can't use more then 2Gb anyway.
If your renders consistently require more than 2gb of ram you may want to invest in two high speed SATA drives and put them on a stripe RAID. (You will double the speed of caching and retrieving from the drive)

I hope this helps.
Mano

Quote - Thank you all for the inputs.    
I'll keep and run my Poser app from my internal SATA drive, and move all the additional runtimes to my external drive.

Also, thank you spacedragon1234 for bringing up the potential problem re:  my system RAM.
I just replaced one of my old 512M RAMs  with a new 1G RAM chip, so it's now 1.5G.  
So far so good, but I'm concerned about the potential problem that might arise in the future.

Has anybody here encountered any problem with a system RAM that's not 1G, 2G, or 4G?

Thanks!

I've got 1.5 GB and have had no memory problems. (My motherboard, which is about 5 years old, supports up to three memory chips. One problem I had when replacing my original 512 MB chip was that my two new chips, which had specs identical to the old one, wouldn't play well with it, so I bought a third new chip.

(So if you are going with paired chips, buy them both at the same time.)

1. Poser 7 on a PC can use more than 2 GB as it can render in multiple threads.

2. Poser 6 and lower on a PC cannot use more than 2 GB of ram. This is a problem with windows only allowing 4 GB per process (2 for the kernel and 2 for the application). Google "windows 2GB process limit" for technical explanation. [Victoria 4 at max res with the armadesa hair it comes with, wont render at max quality on Poser 6 PC due to the textures needing more than 2 GB]

3. Macs dont have this problem with Poser 6 or 7. Unknown other versions.

4. RAM needs to be matched if you have more than one stick. That means all sticks electrically compatible, and the same size. Google "mismatched ram problems". Otherwise not only will your dual channel ram not be dual channel, but you'll get crashes. Not many, but enough to make a diference if you ship hundreds of PCs (and get you slaughtered by tech magazines for doing that). Most people who build their own PCs are really sloppy - they throw in any amount of ram and never use antistatic straps when handling the chips ... you'd get fired by a major manufactuer for even touching RAM without wearing an antistatic strap. :-)  As a result people think Windows is a lot less stable than it really is ... there are Windows webservers that have run without a reboot for months at high CPU usage % with their drives in constant use - but they're built properly.

Attached Link: The 4GB Windows Memory Limit: What does it really mean?

I could be wrong. I'm more familiar with Macs and their limitations.

Here is a quick link I googled:
http://www.brianmadden.com/content/content.asp?ID=69

Likos, re-read 2nd sentence of 4th paragraph of the article you linked (not counting italicised prologue) :-)

Basically the application can "fork" off a number of sub-processes and each sub-process can use its own 2 GB of data memory, so if you need 8 GB, you just fork 3 times.   Kernel memory is shared but you don't use that for data - each new process has just a small kernel footprint.   That 2 GB of kernel ram can support many dozens of processes, each with its own 2 GB of data.

Poser 7 can use a second thread for rendering if you set it in the options.

Pixara - A USB drive is way too slow to run Poser, but O.K. to keep external runtimes.

spacedragon1234 - I'm %99.9 sure your drive speeds are incorrect.  A SATA HDD is 150MBs/second, which is slightly faster than it's predessesor the Ultra ATA IDE drive, which runs at 133MB/s. 

SATA2 drives run at 200MB/s.

Before the UATA drive IDE drives ran at 66MBs, and 33 MBs before that.

The confusing thing about USB, and USB2 drives is that they are measured in Mb(Not MB.)  Mb means MegaBits, rather than MegaBytes.  A MegaBit is much smaller than a MegaByte.

Although I think your ratio is correct, off hand I beleive SATA is about 10x faster than USB.

I never posted any drive speeds at all.   Do you mean interface speeds?   If so, I have checked and I think I have the correct values in bits per second.  I'll forget you confused drive and interface speed if you accept that my spellchecker capitalised the 'b' of Mb and I'm too lazy to spank it? :-)

In theory USB2 has a theoretical max of 480 but I challenge someone to demonstrate that to me. Then again, I think there's still a lot of older PCs with crappy PCI busses out there which might explain why it tends to measure around 300.