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JoeB94
Known Participant
August 24, 2020
Question

Photo processing off an external SSD drive?

  • August 24, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 6816 views

Good Morning,

 

I am totally new to the world of Mac and Lr Classic & I have a new 21.5 inch iMac with a 1TB fusion HDD drive, which I am going to be using for my new photography hobby.

 

Now the OS and processing software (Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop is obviously on the internal HDD drive, but I wondered if I was to use an external usb SSD drive to store the actual photos and process them off the external ssd rather than the internal drive, would this make processing them faster & smoother? I’m not a big fan of filling up the internal drive with storage I like to keep that free for OS & program files..

 

Many Thanks Joe 🙂

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1 reply

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 24, 2020

That will work fine. Many of us who work on laptops, including myself, store most of our Lightroom Classic photos on one or more external volumes.

 

A Lightroom Classic catalog can track images in any normal folder in any number of local volumes, internal or external; it will remember their folder paths. Each volume is listed at the top level of the Folders panel. If you want to edit a photo on an external volume that isn’t mounted, Lightroom Classic will let you know the photo is on a missing volume. All you have to do is plug in the volume and Lightroom Classic will reconnect to the photos on it.

 

Using an external volume does not necessarily make processing faster or smoother.

Develop module processing depends on the CPU and graphics hardware.

Preview building speed depends on the CPU, including number of cores.

 

It’s best to store the catalog and its previews cache on a fast hard drive or an SSD, because that’s where the majority of the I/O happens during editing. The speed of the storage containing the original image files is less important because they’re only read in once to edit; after that they’re in RAM or in the previews cache. So there’s usually not much advantage in storing original raw files on an SSD instead of a fast hard drive, as long as the hard drive is connected by USB 3.0 or faster.

    J
    JoeB94Author
    Known Participant
    August 24, 2020

    Hi Conrad, thank you very much for your reply and advice, very much appreciated 🙂

     

    I totally understand what your saying & in that case I may consider saving a bit of money and looking at maybe the fastest standard USB C HDD drive I can get, as this will still be cheaper than an SSD drive and at the end of the day the current set up is still a lot fast than my previous windows laptops aha 🙂

     

    Follwing on from this may I ask, do you use another external drive to keep a back up of the images/raw files or do people now use cloud storage?

     

    Many thabks 🙂

    Conrad_C
    Community Expert
    Conrad_CCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 24, 2020

    I use this OWC 4-bay enclosure, because it was relatively affordable, fast enough for SSDs, and has 4 drive bays that I can upgrade at any time with common hard drives and SSDs of whatever capacity I need. I have hard drives in there containing all my photos, videos/music, document archives, etc; the photo/video hard drive is 7200RPM (the Seagate Barracuda/WD Black type of performance hard drive). It also contains one older SSD I use as a fast scratch/cache drive for Photoshop and video editing. It connects to my Mac with a 10 Gb/sec USB-C cable. It sometimes goes on sale for under $200.

     

    It is not an NAS (Network Attached Storage) because I did not need network access to it.

    It is not set up as a RAID, because I don’t need that, but it can be set up as one.

    Of course I have another set of drives that backs up all the data in there.

     

    If all I did was high resolution video editing, I would have gotten a Thunderbolt version. But that expense is not necessary for photography and simple video editing.

     

    I used to use ready-made external drives, but when I wanted to upgrade, I had pay for a whole new drive and dispose of the entire old one. Now, even for a single drive, I strongly prefer buying an empty enclosure with a fast interface, where I can put in any drive that meets my needs. When it’s time to upgrade, I only need to buy a new internal drive and put it in, not pay for an entire drive and enclosure.

     

    You also asked about cloud storage. That can be a great secondary solution, but my Internet upload speed is not fast enough to make it practical. For some who have both download and upload speeds that are very high, cloud storage can be a somewhat practical storage solution.

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