Probably you have one of those with a laptop HDD inside (2.5", 5400rpm) - of course those USB HDD will be slower than a desktop HDD!
USB3 for them is just overkill, they don't even saturate an USB2 connection, it is used just because it can supply more current to the drive (1A for USB 3.0 versus only 0.5A for USB 2.0).

I use WD external drives on USB 3.0 and have no issues with PD13. The original files and the rendered files all go to the external drive. Win 10, i7

Quote: Just reporting what I found out today...
I go back and forth, from work office to home. I try to take my PD13 video projects with me. I am a consulting chemical engineer, and sometimes have opportunity to work on my PD13 projects at my refinery office.
I have a new Western Digital USB hard drive, and use it to take my PD projects back and forth. I found out today, that its performance is very poor, even though it's a USB 3.0 device.
I have a PDS project file that I created at work, and saved to my USB external drive. I brought the drive home, launched the PDS file from it. PowerDirector was very, very, very, slow. So, I saved the PDS file to my computer hard drive, launched it from there, and the performance gain was amazing.
Just curious if others had experienced the same.
Clark

Hi Clark

Your observations are spot on.

The PDS file on an external drive is really slow.

You can however as HDedit has suggested export and import files to and from external hard drives as you might not have enough storage on your internal hard drive.

I believe PD needs about 100 GB of free space on your internal hard drive to operate efficiency.
Happing editing

Best Regards

Neil
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Thanks for the replies and information.

HDedit and CubbyHouseFilms,

Do you believe it is OK to keep the source image and video files on an external USB hard drive, but the PDS file should always be on the internal hard drive ??

Clark

I use external drives all the time, media content and pds files, no issues at all with PD13.

USB3 HD in a USB2 computer port will perform poorly, obviously at USB2 speeds, is that what you are doing? My USB3 drive in a computer with USB3 port works fine with PD13.

A HD in USB2 port ~30MB/sec, HD in USB3 port, ~180MB/sec, so yes a big difference, HD in an internal SATA3 port, ~180MB/sec. Your actual HD performance also depends on what drive you have, many WD drives with varying performance.

All performance results quoted are ATTO Disk Benchmark (read).

Jeff

Jeff, the USB3 speed is just maximum link speed. The actual speed varies a lot between devices.
External HDD with supplemental power supply are usually desktop grade HDD, with higher rotation speed (7200 rpm), lower latency, bigger cache...
HDD without an additional power pack/supply are small factor (laptop), low-power, low performance HDD's.
Even the memory sticks - some cheap ones are labeled USB3 but barely can sustain speeds of 5MB/s (I saw one at work). Good USB3 sticks can handle 20-30MB/s.

Now, in my tests I found out that PD13 doesn't use very efficiently the I/O devices. HDD is read in short bursts with a low average speed between them.
If the system has an adequate caching mechanism for that, it can be OK - bigger RAM cache installed on HDD (some have even a SDD in the HDD for caching), dedicated cache on controller (I have a RAID card with 256MB), sufficient Windows memory allocated for cache (not very efficient IMO).

Quote: Jeff, the USB3 speed is just maximum link speed. The actual speed varies a lot between devices.

Of course, that's why the exact same HD was used in all 3 tests, real actual performance. The maximum USB3 link speed is 625MB/sec, yes well above my HD capability.

Jeff

We still don't know what type of HDD OP has. Probably yours is the bigger form factor, with auxiliary power supply.
PS: I have an external back-up drive, connected trough e-SATA. It's speed is like it was installed inside the PC. But is sensitive to mechanical accidents - cat knock it over while in use, I almost lost 2TB

My external HD is ....

WD My Passport Ultra 2TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Auto Backup

My computer is a one-year old Dell desktop, with USB 3.0. It has 16 GB of RAM.

I did see a very major difference when I copied the PDS file to my internal hard drive, and launched it from there.

Quote: My external HD is ....

WD My Passport Ultra 2TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Auto Backup

My computer is a one-year old Dell desktop, with USB 3.0. It has 16 GB of RAM.

I did see a very major difference when I copied the PDS file to my internal hard drive, and launched it from there.

I'd simply do a speed check and see what you have both on your internal HD and your external Passport. If performing better when on a internal HD simply tells me your external drive potentially is slow. One-year old Dell does not help a lot, for instance a new Dell Inspiron 3000 desktop has no USB3 ports on the front panel, only USB2. Yes it does have two in the rear, again my basic question if you know for sure you are plugging the drive in a USB3 port.

Jeff

Quote: My external HD is ....

WD My Passport Ultra 2TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Auto Backup

The bad news in the name is the "Portable" bit
It's exactly what I was talking about. They are cute, good for back-up, but utterly useless for work directly on them.

Also, what Jeff mentioned is important - I assumed you know which is the USB3 port on your computer, but it might not be the case. Although, a single USB2 port won't support the power needed for the drive, it might "work" and lead to issues.
My Dell laptop has just one USB3 and is located on left side - it is a combo port USB3/eSATA.

I had actually never considered that some of my USB ports may be USB2 and some USB3.

So, I got out my manual for my Dell XPS One 2710. All 6 USB ports are clearly marked USB3.0. Two are on the left-side, facing, and four are in the rear. I am plugged into one of the side USB ports.

Thanks for the question. It was definitely worth checking out.

Again, I'd simply do a little speed check so you have a few facts to work with. My experience is anything greater than about 60-70MB/sec read performance, PD performs no different with basic HD 1920x1080 24Mbps source footage located on any drive. Anything less than that, yes additional lag to the editing interface.

Another possibility perhaps, any chance your virus scan application treats any external USB HD with a full scan? That will make it perform poorly with PD. That drive also supports encryption, can be another significant performance drag.

I've never tested one, but many sites report the performance of the WD Ultra Passport to be in the 70-100MB/sec range, an example, http://www.storagereview.com/wd_my_passport_ultra_review . If on the lower end, very possible you see a difference. Without a few facts one can only continue to guess at reasons why it's a slow editing experience, all I know, it does not have to be, I use properly configured externals all the time and can't tell a user editing difference.

Jeff

Jeff,

I downloaded the ATTO Disk Benchmark utility, and ran it on all of my hard drives. I do have a third external USB hard drive - a Toshiba Canvio USB, which I do NOT use for PowerDirector files, but I ran the benchmark on it, for comparison purposes.

The results were roughly this, in Read Times..
Dell Internal - 150, varied a bit
WD Passport Ext - 110, fairly constant
Toshiba Ext - 65, fairly constant

I've also attached the outputs.

Based on these results, the WD Passport should have plenty of performance. I do not have any security activated on the drive. And my virus program is not scanning it.

I will try again.

Thanks much for your information.

Clark

Thanks for the posted attachment. That little "portable" preforming rather well for a portable, in fact, probably higher than any internal HD from ~3yrs back for a home off the shelf system which where generally always below 100MB/sec read. Based on my tested experience of external USB drives from ~15MB/sec - 400+MB/sec read, I would not have expected a issue with PD and the WD ultra at ~110MB/sec read. Something else perhaps playing a role.

Do you by chance use PD shadow file concept?

A pic of your PD timeline and library as well as footage details may provide a few insights or at least the ability to try and replicate.

Quote: I have a PDS project file that I created at work, and saved to my USB external drive. I brought the drive home, launched the PDS file from it. PowerDirector was very, very, very, slow. So, I saved the PDS file to my computer hard drive, launched it from there, and the performance gain was amazing.

If you could elaborate a little on this statement in OP may help too. Saving the PDS file to a new location and launching would still read the library content off the external HD as the hard path to the media is encoded in the PDS file. So as an example, if I had a file test.pds stored on a external USB drive(G:) which contained my whole project and media files used in this project where on G:, then if I simply copy my test.pds to C: and launch, it will read all media files from G:.
Jeff

>> Do you by chance use PD shadow file concept?

Probably not. Since I don't know what that is... :

I'll hold off on uploading photos of timeline, etc, and continue to experiment for a while. At this moment, I am back on my work computer, running PD from the WD, with no performance problems.

The problem last week was that every action that I took in PD just "took forever". If I tried to move a button, nothing happened for a minute or two, until the button finally moved. Other actions performed the same way - stuck, not moving, and then finally a result.

When I copied the PDS file to my computer, PD immediately started working fine.

I had wondered about where the library files were read - if PD looked into the directory first where the PDS file was stored. Based on your comment, that answer is "no", since the file locations are hard-coded and not relative locations.

Clark

Quote: >> Probably not. Since I don't know what that is... :

Probably so then, since by default they are on unless you turned them off.

Quote: I'll hold off on uploading photos of timeline, etc, and continue to experiment for a while. At this moment, I am back on my work computer, running PD from the WD, with no performance problems.

So I guess the external portable drive can work fine then with no issues.

The pds file is only a instruction set on what to do with all the various media you may have loaded in your project. It does not actually contain any of the media files, just a hard coded pointer to where it resides on the computer at the time of import into your PD project.

Jeff.

Probably so then, since by default they are on unless you turned them off.

Yeah, I just looked in the "ShadowEditFiles" Folder, and see 3 GB of old stuff there. I need to keep my eye on that, or Auto-Delete on lower number of days.

So I guess the external portable drive can work fine then with no issues.

There are no performance problems right now, even though I had major ones last week. Yes, I'm a "lot smarter" about a few things, but no smarter about why my PD system slowed down to a hesitating crawl last week.

Quote: [Yeah, I just looked in the "ShadowEditFiles" Folder, and see 3 GB of old stuff there. I need to keep my eye on that, or Auto-Delete on lower number of days.

Depending on details of footage being edited, very likely you can turn shadow files off.

Quote: There are no performance problems right now, even though I had major ones last week. Yes, I'm a "lot smarter" about a few things, but no smarter about why my PD system slowed down to a hesitating crawl last week.

Slowness could have very likely been the generation of the shadow files. When shadow files are not where they are expected for a editing session, they are recreated. Location is not retained in the pds editing file. This can take, again depending on timeline and details of footage being edited, a reasonable amount of time and can also put a very reasonable load on the PC at the time. During this period of shadow file creation, a very lethargic editing platform on some PC's does occur.

Jeff