Quote - How could I forget that, yes the dialoge box before you hit make movie.   

As far as the internal use hard drives, I didn't think that would affect performance.  Isn't RAM for that?   So if you have alot of programs installed, just make sure they're not running while you're working?  

RAM -is- used for that; the more the better. But the OS still uses the swapfile on C, and the default is a dynamic swapfile that expands and contracts as the OS wills. The more real estate taken up on the platters with other things, the more the swap data gets shoved into whatever niche is available, and the longer it takes for the OS to do a read of same. With no additional programs on C, you don't run into the slowdown issues drive fragmentation will cause.

The way most renderers work is:

Load program in ram

load all content in ram

any scripts, shader language, etc.

Begin render in ram. If render components exceed available ram size, move completed components to temp storage on C (When you start talking about renders, depending on just how you set them up, you can be creating separate shadow maps for each light, doing ray bounce calculations that take a lot of space: this is all floating point math, so sometimes the values can get huge from a storage perspective. Photon mapping, literally dozens of potential layers to the finished product. We only simulate reality, and that involves a =lot= of cheating and tricks under the hood), then bring them back as space frees up so the final product can be assembled. The closer you get towards 'photorealistic', the complexity going on under the hood goes up by orders of magnitude.

And yeah, you do not want to try and run any other program while you render. Doing setup and keyframing is one things; nearly all those functions are still single threaded, so a multi core system would only be hitting one processor. It's rare to find renderers that are not multi threaded, and capable of eating you whole system's resources  and happily ask for more.

 

 Oh, the 'empty frames' refers to the external hard drive cases; some -look- sexy on the outside, but inside are pretty much garbage (circuit boards glued down with rubber cement, hair thin wires from the connectors, things like that. And if it is a cheap company, you get defects like no mounting posts for the hard drive,  or they send an old IDE drive frame when you ordered a SATA. You always open your goodies, give a good inspection, and if you find flaws, get a return number and get it back and get what you ordered. If you can build your own, check out pricewatch.com. You can find a lot of stuff you never thought existed. It's not a business, but a clearing site to redirect you to a business site.