Moving VaM folder to a different drive

[btacoses]

My VaM folder currently resides on my main drive, which is a M2 NVMe. It's getting to be pretty massive and I think I will need to relocate it to my internal hard drive (7200rpm). I have two questions:

1. Will I see a significant performance drop going from a M2 drive to a hard drive with a platter? Usually with games, you only deal with slower loading. I don't know anything about how VaM works and whether it is using the hard drive in addition to the RAM when it's in operation.

2. Will moving the entire folder to another drive cause any problems with VaM running, locating dependent assets, etc? I would suppose it's not adding and drawing from registry entries that are specific to VaM, so that wouldn't be an issue, but I wonder whether file associations are ever using the drive name.

All help is greatly appreciated.

 

[RandomVAMUser]

1. Yes, you will. Most noticeable initial load time and scene loading (and overall smoothness of UI when opening clothing/hair tabs..etc).
I noticed difference going from HDD to SSD(sata), and then again (but not so mayor) from SATA SSD to M.2 NVMe.

2. Nope, i moved my VAM client from one system onto USB to another system.
Everything works fine.

EDIT: 1.20.0.x update with texture caching did help speed-up loading, but still not enough for HDD inmo

 

[btacoses]

1. Yes, you will. Most noticeable initial load time and scene loading (and overall smoothness of UI when opening clothing/hair tabs..etc).
I noticed difference going from HDD to SSD(sata), and then again (but not so mayor) from SATA SSD to M.2 NVMe.

2. Nope, i moved my VAM client from one system onto USB to another system.
Everything works fine.

EDIT: 1.20.0.x update with texture caching did help speed-up loading, but still not enough for HDD inmo

Thanks, this is helpful. To my knowledge, even with USB 3.2 Gen 2, an external SSD is faster than a HDD. I guess that would apply here, correct? I guess if it's simple to move, I could always try it on the HDD and switch back if it's too bad.

 

[RandomVAMUser]

Well nowadays everything is faster than HDD, even SSD's on older SATAII interface.

Sure, move it to HDD and see for yourself,
if load speed is "ok" then you'll know your answer.

 

[DJ]

One compromise would be to move the VaM cache to your HHD and leave VaM itself on your SSD. That would clear up a ton of space with virtually no performance hit.

 

[TToby]

One compromise would be to move the VaM cache to your HHD and leave VaM itself on your SSD. That would clear up a ton of space with virtually no performance hit.

Hi DJ, this is new to me. Can you please explain this a bit more? From my limited point of technical understanding, I would have thought about having the cache on the faster memory device. I was thinking about the cache to collect some code and content that is frequently used, and then make it fast accessable on a fast memory. Like a CPU or GPU is using cache to speed up things.

 

[DJ]

Hi DJ, this is new to me. Can you please explain this a bit more? From my limited point of technical understanding, I would have thought about having the cache on the faster memory device. I was thinking about the cache to collect some code and content that is frequently used, and then make it fast accessable on a fast memory. Like a CPU or GPU is using cache to speed up things.

One of the first things I checked when caching came out was what kind of performance hit I took when using it on HHD. To get a good, long base load time, I loaded a model up with about 4 pages worth of clothing items (she looked like an arctic homeless person!) and tested the cached load times from my m.2 drive and my 7200 rpm HHD.

The m.2 drive loaded it all in something like 44 seconds. From the HDD it took 0.5 seconds longer.

The upshot is that the VaM processing time to load a cached piece of clothing (on my i7 7700k overclocked to 5.1 GHz, anyway) is higher than the access times for either M.2 or HHD. The drive isn't the bottleneck, so drive speed isn't crucial.

Now if you have an amazingly fast CPU and/or an ancient HHD your results may be different. If you run a test of your own, remember to remove all clothing and press the "unload unused textures" button from the "control & physics 1" tab before loading. Vam keeps recently used textures in memory, so if you don't clear that out, you'll be loading from RAM rather than your cache, which will make your test meaningless.

 

[TToby]

Thank you for explaining @DJ ! I was not aware of this. I have to believe your testings in that point, because I am too clumsy in VR and don't think I could measure a loading time difference of 1 sec and below. I will try this, because VaM occupies about half of my M.2 SSD space already. Thank you.