Advice on new setup of Lightroom classic

[Travelmoniker]

My current setup :

Software : 

Lightroom Classic : Release 12.1 / Camera Raw: 15.1

Mac OS : 13.1

Hardware :

2017 15 inch Macbook Pro (planning on moving to M2/M2 pro)

4tb Lacie external hard drive with USB-C

4tb Lacie external hard drive with USB 

Portable 5TB WD external hard drive for backup & offsite storage 

2tb Samsung SSD 

Photo and. Videos size : 2.1 TB 

My present workflow consists of Lightroom library stored on 2TB portable Samsung SSD and all photos and videos are stored on 4tb Lacie external hard drive with USB-C. This is slowing me down considerable 

Using Carbon Copy Clone (CCC) I backup Lightroom room library on Apple icloud, all photos and videos on another Lacie drive and on 5TB WD drive. 

To improve my workflow and create adequate backup, I am thinking of the following options :

Option 1

I am planing on buying 1) LaCie 16TB 2big Dock 2-Bay Thunderbolt 3 RAID Array (Black) and configure to RAID 1 so that I can save Lightroom library on Apple MacBook Pro with M2/M2pro internal SSD and all photos and videos are saved on LaCie 16TB configured on RAID 1 so that i get increased speed in processing photos and also backup is avalable. 

Option 2

Buy SanDisk Professional 7.68TB G-DRIVE PRO STUDIO SSD and save all photos and videos on this drive and Lightroom library on Apple MacBook Pro internal SSD and backup all photos and videos on exsiting 4TB Lacie drives using CCC. 

Please suggest ideal workflow from the above 2 options 

[dj_paige]

This is slowing me down considerable

Explain this further, and in detail, specifically what actions in LrC are slow? If the speed problem is in the Develop Module, faster disk speed will improve things only trivially.

In essence, I don't think you have clearly defined the problem; and therefore I don't think we can recommend a solution.

[Jao vdL]

RAID 1 does not give you backup, just redundancy which is good but not the same as backup. You would still need to backup in option 1 therefore. So from a data protection standpoint option 2 is the best. It is also going to be the fastest in operation.

[Jao vdL]

Of course if you also backup that RAID array with your existing 4TB drives, option 1 is slightly better from a data protection standpoint but option 2 will be a lot faster than spinning drives in a RAID configuration so the question is whether you value speed over data protection. The difference won't be very large though if you have your catalog on the internal SSD as that is the biggest determinant in speed in Lightroom Classic and the internal SSDs in current MBPs are incredibly fast so when you move to that M2 machine (make sure you get the 1TB SSD and not the 512 GB one if you plan on storing your catatlog on the internal drive) it will be very fast.

For reference, the configuration I use on my M1 Max machine is catalog on internal plus last few months of images. Older images get moved to a NAS in RAID5 configuration connected through 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet. The NAS backs itself up to USB drives and to dropbox cloud storage. This works really well and plenty fast even for images on the NAS. Bonus is that I can wireguard VPN to my home base from anywhere in the world and get access to my images on the NAS.