Using a "thumb" drive or external SSD hard drive for processing

PIX4Dmapper PIX4Dmapper Questions/Troubleshooting
1

I am experimenting with a weird workflow, I think and am curious what everyone thinks.

I would like to use an external SSD USB-C or USB 3 hard drive to store and transfer the p4d projects between computers to better utilize processing time and open computers. Essentially the files would reside on this hard drive and be transferred between computers. The best option for my situation would be that we could load a single project on a thumb drive so as to prepare, annotate and otherwise edit files on one computer, and then transport them to a different computer for the final, more rigorous processing.

It could also help because of my computers, not all have SSD ssd drives.

Aside from the obvious that it’s not an internal hard drive, does anyone know if any problems when using the hard drives in this way?

Thanks in advance.

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Hey Andrew, thank you for sharing a detailed description of your workflow.

My biggest concern with your proposal is the additional time it will take to process your project because of the slower processing speed when you store the images and project files on an external drive. Ideally, you would take the opportunity to store the project data and images on the same internal hard drive while you are processing the project and then transfer the images, .p4d file, and Results Folder back to an external drive to save space on your internal drive and migrate the project to a different computer.

Do not hesitate to let me know if that doesn’t answer your question.

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Thanks, Andrew.

We are actually not seeing too much of a slowdown at this point. And the file we’re testing with has approximately 1,200 images. We are going through some additional image calibration for about 400 of the images at the moment. And the reoptimizarion is only taking a few minutes.

But I am going to test further by installing a ssd in one of the computers and see if that helps. Ill let you know what we find.

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Andrew, glad to hear that you did not experience a significant increase in processing time when you stored your project data on an external drive.

Please let us know what you find when you compare processing time between your internal SSD and external drive.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

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