I'm about to undergo my annual reformatting of my hard drive and had a question about optimizing my Carrara setup.  As I have it now, I have my 1 T HD partitioned into 2 drives, the Carrara exe files and such are on one drive and all my Poser content is on the other drive.  (I already had all my Poser stuff on the other drive and just let Carrara default to the C drive when I installed it.)

My question is, is it more advantageous to have Carrara and all the runtimes on the same HD (partition) or have I been slowing things down by having them on separate ones?

Thanks for any and all input.

I think that this really make no difference. I use my Runtime in a secondary drive and works fine. I think that a slow drive will make things load slow.

Thanks!  I've noticed that it usually takes several minutes to load and/or save a relatively normal .car file.  (2 or 3 figures and background and props).  Just wondering if that was due to my configuration or if it was normal.  I have a WD 7200 RPM SATA 1 T HD, so I assume it should be fast enough.

I too also have all of my poser content, third party and personel carrara projects/contents on my external hard drive and it doesn't slow down anything at all. I do the same on my Music side too.

Just add Poser content and will take a lot of time to load or save scenes...

personal experience...... if you have one large drive formatted with two or more partitions, the data transfer is slower than if you had two physical drives

Yes, thats right. The good idea is to have a dedicated HD to the content, because the system will acess data as a two or more drivers in one, thats why theres a slow in the data reading. But Since I cant have a dedicated HD for that for now, I am happy with mine using one partition to all Runtime folder.

I've had reasonably good result having a dedicated hd for my 3d apps.  I have the apps installed on an external hd drive.  Core components are stored on you C drive, while the bulk of content is stored on the external.

It makes for easier housekeeping.  My downloaded content is stored on one partition, primarily for backup.  My installed content is installed on another partition.  My resources, textures, brushes, obj files and so on are on a third partition.  I also have another partion that is hidden from the OS that stores my system backup.  My primary partion is for OS and virtual memory (cache).  This allows me to control how much space is needed for each aspect of my computing.

The primary benefit is when my system crashes, I can 'nuke' my system partion with a hard disk utility, use my recovery disks for the out of the box state, then restore my system from my hidden partition.  This allows me to troubleshoot Bios, HD, or OS problems.  The separate partitions makes it easier to run routine utilities on a regular basis quickly.  Also when I upgrade to a higher capacity hd , I clone the partitions in stages rather than one huge mondo process.

The bad part is when I have to re-install my plug-ins.  There are two Carrara directories, one on the root (OS) partition and a second one in the partition that Carrara is installed.  The manufacturer will specify what directory to install.  I normally leave a text document to my self for future reference when I run across a  problem.