Affinity desperately needs a way to direct the cache away from the main hard drive

[Frozen Death Knight 471]

This problem has been driving me nuts lately. Because of my hard drive only having a couple of GBs at most to work with since I use a lot of programs, I have come to rely on my other hard drives for storage space and only let the essential stuff run from my SSD. However, because I can't for some reason change the cache directory during a work session, I am constantly bombarded with this message since Affinity keeps using up my main SSD.

Because of this I am constantly having to reload my projects. While nothing really gets lost since the program does successfully save, it is still a very, very annoying thing to have to deal with. It also doesn't help that because of lack of memory that my web browser keeps shutting down, so the problem keeps spreading because of the lack of a cache directory feature built into Affinity.

I hope you consider having this as a high priority. Files can get quite big when working, so it would be to most people's benefit.

[Blende21 66]

Usually the primary drive has by far the best performance. On my MacBook Pro the internal SSD runs on appr. 4-5 times the speed of an external USB 3 SSD. Only an external Thunderbolt 3 SSD would be a match, for a prohibitive price.

Because a Cache means swapping data a lot, speed is important. I think it is logical to place the Cache on this drive.

if you can’t upgrade your SSD, can’t you remove stuff from the primary drive ?

[Frozen Death Knight 471]

2 hours ago, Blende21 said:

Usually the primary drive has by far the best performance. On my MacBook Pro the internal SSD runs on appr. 4-5 times the speed of an external USB 3 SSD. Only an external Thunderbolt 3 SSD would be a match, for a prohibitive price.

Because a Cache means swapping data a lot, speed is important. I think it is logical to place the Cache on this drive.

if you can’t upgrade your SSD, can’t you remove stuff from the primary drive ?

I have more than one SSD you know... Affinity is using the smallest one of them as well, since I originally installed Windows on it and then later installed a secondary SSD years later. You honestly think I will completely reinstall Windows and move all important files (over 500 GB) from both SSDs elsewhere just because Affinity can't switch drivers for cache storage? Absolutely not.

[sfriedberg 121]

7 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

I have more than one SSD you know

Hear, hear!

See also

 

[carl123 2,203]

9 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Because of my hard drive only having a couple of GBs at most to work with since I use a lot of programs,

 

6 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

I have more than one SSD you know... Affinity is using the smallest one of them as well, since I originally installed Windows on it and then later installed a secondary SSD years later.

I was facing the same situation a few years ago and eventually had to bite the bullet and get a larger SSD drive.

Rather than having to reinstall the OS and all programs/progdata etc I simply cloned the old drive to a file then using that file recreated the entire OS drive to my new SSD

Worked perfectly and only took an hour.

The app I used to do this is called Macrium Reflect and the free version does all this. It also allows you to schedule daily/weekly etc clones of your OS drive to another drive, so in the event your OS drive gets corrupted or dies it's a simple job to recreate it using the cloned files, which I have had to do more than once since installing it.

One of my best free apps, that simply worked as intended and now constantly protects me from what would be a major disaster/issue if my OS drive ever dies again.

Even if other people reading this have no current issues with their OS drive I would recommend downloading Macrium Reflect and scheduling daily/weekly clones of your OS drive just in case a major disaster occurs one day.

For reference my current SSD OS drive is using 149GB (out of 214GB available). The clone backup file is 76GB. The software is set to do 2 clone backups every week and keep the last 12 backups (all settings are configurable)

[Blende21 66]

The logic behind „I have 500 GB of crap on my c- drive, and can’t move ANY of it away“ defies me.

And - haw, haw - I have more than one SSD as well. But  1) on a MacBook Pro there is no easy way to replace or enlarge the primary SSD, 2) it runs at above 2.000 MB/s, so everything that has to do with operations (incl. caches) better runs there / runs better there, 3) very „creative“ program installations sometimes lead to issues, at once or when updating.

IMHO documents can go to a secondary SSD, or even better to a network server. Usually we work on a few files at a time, which is quite ok at 500 MB/s storage speed with an USB3-SSD, or even at 100MB/s LAN speed. Just takes some prior thinking and doing into the own storage deployment.

[Jowday 947]

😄 🤬

Meanwhile professionals have options like this in Photoshop - and many other programs:

And yes the main drive is running out of space - it is not a new pc. No junk, I have removed all unnecessary files and programs. But it was like this for years with no problems with other programs. The first drive is a dedicated scratch-temp files drive (shared by several programs) and the last drive (4TB) my data drive. And yet the main drive is still pushed to the limit. Fx because of a lot of Affinity brushes I purchased.

Serif decided to push the hardware to the limit for performance reasons - also what regards file sizes. Brush files alone; GB upon GB. And now that Affinity doesn't even share brushes, just code, you have to install GB of duplicate brushes in Designer and Photo - and perhaps some in Publisher. An engineer in a tightly sealed bunker would probably point at the customers but with this "use the hardware to the max" philosophy Serif simply must live up to their claim of being makers of professional software and let users store data and temp files somewhere else.

It is simply bad it-architecture.

Anyway, you got what you paid for. Not much.

[Frozen Death Knight 471]

I agree with @Jowday in spirit. I think it is a cop-out to say that the user has to adapt to the program when the program is a clear outlier among its peers. Not being able to direct the cache in a business where cache data can fill a lot of disk space is just poorly thought out. Having to change your entire infrastructure for handling data for a single program which will take days to restructure is just a lot of unnecessary inconvenience. Pretty much every program I use has solved the cache data issue, so why can't Affinity?

I have been able to adapt to a lot of Affinity's shortcomings and I think the devs have done a pretty decent job at addressing some of the core issues I've had lately with good communication on their end. I am sure they will understand my point and address this eventually. I am however not going to restructure everything on my PC from scratch when I have had no problems in the past. It is not worth the time and effort just to make this single problem go away. Sorry.

[Frozen Death Knight 471]

5 hours ago, Blende21 said:

The logic behind „I have 500 GB of crap on my c- drive, and can’t move ANY of it away“ defies me.

And - haw, haw - I have more than one SSD as well. But  1) on a MacBook Pro there is no easy way to replace or enlarge the primary SSD, 2) it runs at above 2.000 MB/s, so everything that has to do with operations (incl. caches) better runs there / runs better there, 3) very „creative“ program installations sometimes lead to issues, at once or when updating.

IMHO documents can go to a secondary SSD, or even better to a network server. Usually we work on a few files at a time, which is quite ok at 500 MB/s storage speed with an USB3-SSD, or even at 100MB/s LAN speed. Just takes some prior thinking and doing into the own storage deployment.

Being condescending to excuse bad design will not give you any points, I'm afraid.

Also, I don't use Macs while working and I do not care about what your Mac can and can't do. Plus, you talk like you have multiple people working together with you with multiple computers. I am one guy with one PC with very few options but to restructure everything from scratch to make this work. Assuming everyone has the same options as you is just plain arrogant.

[Blende21 66]

... talking about arrogance, or being offensive ...

No more replies needed here, I assume.