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ndfred
Participant
October 20, 2019
Question

Lightroom CC is barely usable with originals on a NAS

  • October 20, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 1064 views

Hi everyone!

 

I have a MacBook Pro with 512GB of SSD, and a 250GB Lightroom library which took up most of the space. I also have a Synology NAS where I eventually offloded all of my original files following this official guide. The migration took a couple of hours but worked out fine.

 

When I use Lightroom now though, it really is impossibly slow:

  • Importing a load of 30 24 Mpix pictures took 30 minutes, and froze the Lightroom UI
  • Working with panorama merged photos is almost impossible, selecting the merged image will sometimes do nothing at all
  • Quitting Lightroom sometimes hangs
  • I've seen Lightroom complain that the NAS disconnects which doesn't give me a great deal of confidence
  • While all this is happening, there is no indication in the UI that anything is loading from the NAS, which again leaves me wondering if anything is happening at all, or what the problem is

 

Are there ways to better diagnose what is going on? Should I just buy an external SSD (clunky, but at least that should work) and call it a day?

 

I am accessing my NAS over Wifi (5GHz 802.11n so ~250Mbits/s) with an SMB mounted mapped drive. Running an I/O test I get about 400 MB/s on my internal SSD, 30 MB/s on my NAS over Wifi and 100 MB/s over Ethernet. I use raw files which are 25M in size, with merged landscape DNGs between 120 and 200M. Accessing the NAS should be slower, but not that much slower: the 33 files import I described should take around 30 seconds, not 30 minutes.

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    1 reply

    N
    ndfredAuthor
    Participant
    October 20, 2019

    I ran an I/O test on both my internal SSD and my NAS, and I see a notable gap (400 MB/s vs 30 MB/s) but nothing I didn't expect. Is anyone having a good experience using Lightroom with a NAS and what does their performance look like?

     

    I shoot in RAW and each file is about 25MB in size so that would take a second to download from the NAS (which seems OK). Panorama DNG files are 120 ~ 200MB which would take 6 ~ 7s to download, again not the end of the world and certainly nothing like the wait times I am seeing.

     

    As for the import procedure, I had 33 pictures of 24MB each which totals 792MB, copying that over to the NAS should take 27s and not 30 minutes.

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