ZBrushCentral

Hard drive question.

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey guys,

I’m preparing to format my PC and decided i should probably just change out the hard drive instead. Then it got me thinking about this setup i read about like a year ago, but can’t find it anymore.

Basically I had read that it was a good setup to have zbrush use a fast hard drive, the fastest you could get, and have a seprate high volume drive for all your files.

Am i remembering right?
Would the volume of the fast hard drive matter a lot?
How do you make zbrush use the fast one? By installing windows/ZB on that one?

Anyway basically i’d like a rundown of the whole setup so i can go out and buy some new drives. Thanks :slight_smile:

#2

Have a look at the following comments by Aurick
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=54455&highlight=hard+drive+faster

In addition to this I can recommend that you consider getting 8 gigs of ram and windows XP64 (I use Intel Q6600 cpu eg)
and then buy 2 high speed ie 10000RPM hard drives (SATA eg) and put them in a Raid 0 set up. (Your motherboard must support Raid)
Put ZBrush on this raid hard drive setup and make sure that XP puts no pagefile on it. Obviously the operating system is on a different single hard drive.

There may be better solutions out there but that is absolutely great for me and a couple of my collegues. Really the best thing is the strong CPU and the 8 gigs ram which means that Zbrush writes fewer times to hard disk which is the real pain in the ass situation.

#3

RAID may or may not be a good idea. Many users have run into licensing problems on RAID drives. This is something that we’re working on fixing, but it may not be until 3.5 before it’s finally resolved fully.

ZBrush should be installed on the fast drive, since it’s the ZBrush folder that ZBrush writes its virtual files to. Even the smallest raptor drives are plenty of space, provided you don’t go filling the drive up with a ton of apps. I recommend keeping about 10 GB of space free, just to be on the safe side.

By the way, don’t forget to deactivate ZBrush before you monkey with your system. (Press Zplugin>License>Deactivate License) This will return the activation to the server so that you don’t lose it off what your serial number has available.

#4

Thanks guys, good info.