Does a higher spec external hard drive matter?

What we need to know is what kind of internal hard disk you have and how much free space there is on it. 20-30 seconds of beachball spinning is NOT normal for that machine with D850 images. Yes that external disk is very very slow but that shouldn't cause this behavior as long as you don't put your catalog file on it.

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@MoLongfellow wrote:

Is there any advantage in using an external hard drive with faster transfer rates?…and also get a pixelated images that take 20-30 seconds to show correctly. 

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The advantage depends on what you use and how you connect it.

A good, affordable external volume would be a solid-state drive (SSD) connected using USB 3. That should be fast enough.

What are you using now?

If you are currently using an external hard disk drive (HDD), or any kind of external volume connected using USB 2, then there is room for improvement in speed. But if you are already using an SSD connected by USB 3, you are already most of the way there and there is not a lot of room for improvement. For example, you could spend more money on the fastest available external SSD connected by Thunderbolt, but that probably won't be much faster in real world use.

If you are already using an SSD connected by USB 3, that should be fast enough that the performance problem is not with the external storage, it’s somewhere else.

 

I use Lightroom Classis (V11.2) and PS (whatever the most up-to-date version is)!.  I work from an external hard drive so I can switch between my Imac and my Macbook Pro by plugging it into which ever I want to use.  Is there any advantage in using an external hard drive with faster transfer rates?  I read somewhere it doesn't make a difference as it uploads them to a cloud and works from there?

This part is incorrect. There is no upload to cloud to enable you to work with photos.

Speed of the disk drive where the photos are stored has only a small impact on the overall performance of Lightroom Classic.

So, it seems as if you are having performance issues. Why don't you describe the issues instead of picking a solutoin that may have no impact on your specific issues?

Putting your catalog and previews on a fast external hard drive or better still an SSD will help, but your photos less so. Note that I didn't write no difference/improvement. I'm saying this as someone who used a 12TB Raid 0 disk array for photos with close to 400MB/s read/write and more recently an 8TB Raid 0 SSD array and noticed zero difference in LrC performance. Fortunatley, my reasons for switching to SSD for photo storage was to avoid continual spin downs that plague M1 Macs and noise.

BTW, if your iMac is fitted with one of Apple's hybrid Fusion Drive, then I'd certainly be looking to move the catalog/previews to a conventional hard drive or SSD.

Most definitely a faster external drive with lots of free disk space will greatly benefit performance. When you work with LrC it reads and writes to the Lightroom Catalog file and to other support data based files and previews files.

Recommended, minimum or 25% free did space preferable SSD e.g. For a 1TB drive at least 250 GB free space.

LrC syncs smart previews to the Adobe Cloud Storage which is used to share with Lightroom Ecosystem.

Hi Mo,

Thanks for reaching out. That topic can be confusing, and I'd love to help you figure that out.

Lightroom Classic v11.2 is almost offline/computer-based, and having faster storage platform like Solid State Drive (SSD) will give you an upper hand in terms of response rate and overall performance. Consider the type of connection you use: USB A, USB C, or Thunderbolt port.

There are a series of suggestions related to hardware & software optimization and other in-app operations you can do to optimize Lightroom Classic's performance in this article, and please give this a detailed read through: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

Let us know if this help,

Thanks!

Sameer K