This a question on how Vue accesses available HD space.  I had a weird anomaly & need a tech geek to tell my why this happened - if there is in fact a reason.

First off,  I have 3 internal HD’s 120gb = C drive(main)…. 200GB = E……40G = F.

I have Vue loaded on C drive(66GB free) and the Atmos/Objects/Materials libraries loaded onto E(68GB free)

I moved the above libraries to drive F which after moving left only 1.2GB free.

I then tried to use Vue doing various things & it came to a grinding halt & even crashing when trying to load a PZ3.

So, I moved all the above mentioned libraries back to E drive & all was back to normal as it should be.

Now then, my question is why did this happen?  Is it somehow that Vue was trying to do it’s thing on my F drive and was running out of space? Since there was only 1.2GB free?

 This isn’t a bug – just more out of curiosity – since I thought Vue was executing and calculating on main drive C.

I hope this makes sense.  Thanks :)

How efficiently disk space gets used depends on the file system in use (for Windows, NTFS or FAT).

The difference happens because the older FAT based file system can only deal with a fixed number of chunks of disk space, so as disks get bigger, the minimum amount of space that can be allocated to a file increases.

So if you have a lot of small files you can get a lot of wasted space on a FAT formatted disk.
NTFS is capable of being set to use chunks of just 512 bytes and so the waste per file is very small, but with at the expense of an increased amount of disk space to manage the chunks.

If you look at the properties of a directory or file, you'll see two figures, how much space is being used by the file(s), and how space is allocated.

Unix (and probably Macs) have had efficient file systems (similar to NTFS) for a very long time.

Interesting - I prolly should have mentioned that C & E are NTFS - and F is Fat32 - which is the HD that Vue had trouble with(with those 3 libraries loaded onto it)

It's not executing, or calculating, on any drive. It's doing that in RAM. It could be that Windows is using a drive other than C for paging virtual memory. Remember that free space is never truly accurately reported because of both paging memory to disk and, if you have your machine set to hibernate, reserving of space to record a map of current machine image for resuming.

It's also possible that Vue makes temporary files on the drive from which certain resources are loaded. It was the bain of my life for years that my users kept opening MS Word documents from floppies which, prior to Office XP, resulted in Word creating a temporary file, in which it recorded all changes - complete with times, author etc - on a drive without sufficient space!

It could also just be that your F drive is very slow.

I do believe you've hit the nail on the head JW with the temp file issue :)  As I do see temp files appearing on my E drive. That HD(F) is an old Compaq & it's prolly close to 7-8 years old IIRC(so could be slow on top of that).  That thought never crossed my mind.  Oh well, it's gone back to housing MP3's ;)

Thanks for that explanation :)  Learn something new everyday.

I'd have guessed that it's rather got something to do with vue not finding the related files anymore, I have had that problem after moving my texture file folder to another drive. I also never thought about the temporary files, I would have assumed these are created on the system drive where the operating system or vue is installed. Does vue create the temp files on the drive where the libraries are stored? Maybe thats a bug or so, as it doesnt make much sense to me...

On my system Vue is creating temp files both on C & E - it depends.  Don't ask me how that's beyond my knowledge - but I know it does. 

Hmmm, i find that quite odd. Vue should really either "decide" where to put the temp files, not just any random drive that is "within reach". Can't say its a "bug" as there is no documentation i could find about the temp files, but it sure sounds odd.