What is the preferred drive to keep LR Catalog?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
August 22, 2023
3 replies
1257 views

Hi All,

Is it better to keep the LR Catalog on the same drive as Windows 11 (OS) and LR classic or can LR performance increase by keeping the catalog on a separate drive? I have a Z790 mobo/12th gen i9, with 4 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs. I keep the OS and programs on the main NVMe (C:\). I have a second PCIe 4.0 SSD as a working drive for video rendering. All NVMe SSDs are Samsung 990 pro and have plenty of space. My photos are stored on an 8TB SSD Sata III.

Just wondering if it LR would perform better by having the catalog kept on a seperate NVMe PCI 4.0 or if there really isn't a difference in performance. Thanks!

Windows

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AlexConAuthor

Participant

Lauca - great tips, thanks for the advice. Very helpful.

dj_paige

Legend

Just wondering if it LR would perform better by having the catalog kept on a seperate NVMe PCI 4.0 or if there really isn't a difference in performance.

In general, I agree with @Lauca . I note that many people (including me) have the operating system and the LrC catalog on the same drive, and don't experience slowness. However, you can find the answer easily for your hardware setup. Since most of us don't have your unusual hardware setup, best for you to do the experiment yourself.

Nevertheless, you did not say what actions in Lightroom Classic are slow. Please tell us, be specific, what areas/actions in Lightroom Classic are slow? Some types of slowness are definitely helped by faster disk speed; while for other types of slowness, disk speed makes only a trivial difference. Please tell us what is slow.

AlexConAuthor

Participant

DJ - nothing really wrong with my old rig. Just upgrading to newer tech, more for video rendering gains. On the old rig I had two m.2 NVMe slots and did have my LR catalog on a differen NVMe SSD than the OS. Set that up around 3-4 years ago and I probably thought that was better. While setting up this new rig, I thought I'd ask to see if that was actually best. In the end, with the capability of these NVMe drives, it may not really matter.

dj_paige

Legend

Since you are upgrading to a new computer, I hope you have also chosen to get a top of the line GPU.

Lauca

Participating Frequently

My advice would be to put the catalog (and the associated folders) in the fastest drive. You can also improve the performance by increasing the size of the cache and puting the cache aon the fastest drive, too (see in "Prefences", tab "Performance")

My other advice would to remove the catalog, its associated folders and the cache from the real time scan of the antivirus.

Note that the photos files doesn't need to be on the fastest drive, as this wouldn't impact the performance since LrC does very few acces to them.

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