Surface dock + external hard drive issue when using Lightroom

Report · Dec 02, 2018

Hi,

I use a Surface Pro connected to a monitor via Surface dock. I've also connected an external hard drive (Lacie rugged 4 GB) to the Surface dock. Issues begin when I start Lightroom. Upon starting Lightroom, the external hard drive is disconnected. After a while it connects again but continues to disconnect and reconnect every couple of minutes or so. This only happens when using Lightroom and not when I plug the hard drive straight to the Surface Pro.

The Surface dock is running the latest firmware and I run the latest version of Lightroom Classic CC on Windows 10.

I contacted Microsoft and they told me it's a Lightroom issue. Any help to solve this problem would be great. Thanks!

Report · Dec 03, 2018

Hi arosqvist,

Sorry to hear that you're having issues with Lightroom using your Surface Pro and external drive when both are connected to Surface Dock.

Are you able to see the external drive on Disk Management while using Lightroom in the background? Press Windows + R and type "diskmgmt.msc" and see if you can see it.

Also, what happens if the drive is not connected to the Surface Dock but via a different connection medium?

Thanks,

Akash

Report · Dec 03, 2018

Hi and thanks for getting back to me.

Yes I'm able to see the drive in Disk Management but when it disconnects it disappears from Disk Management and when it reconnects it shows up again and so forth.

As I mentioned in the post when I connect the drive directly to my Surface Pro I don't have this problem. I don't have another connection medium.

Report · Apr 20, 2019

I know this is an old thread but I just recently did an upgrade to Windows 10 on a Surface Pro 3 with a dock. I have been troubleshooting weird new performance issues with external disks and just plain drastically reduced write and read speeds between USB3.0 disks. I'm lucky to get 20mb/s transfer rate now where before I would easily surpass 100mb/s. Something has turned my system into a turd and I have been trouble-shooting it ever since with no luck.

I'm not sure if it's because they all of a sudden did a disk compression to make enough room for a force-push update or just general new driver update issues. Happens to me every time I do an update. I have to reload old drivers or my system becomes a dog. I spend days troubleshooting and then uninstalling the update to get back to normal. It's been really hard to figure out.

I'm not sure I trust Microsoft on this one. I am using Lightroom too however. Upgraded to classic 2019 and it has become a complete and unusable bunch of crap where 2018 was performing 'acceptably' not great but 2019 is getting removed for me. You think I would learn my lesson. Not move to new release until a year for patches and fixes before I do. From others, sounds like a very common problem no matter what you are on.

It just took over 4 minutes to display 10 import images in a preview mode before I started the import. Often I have to wait 45 sec to a minute for LIghtroom to catch up (when it does and does hang) when I am simply doing image reviews and rating after only working on 4-5 images before it starts to become unresponsive. Memory usage climbs and LR finally hangs. Disgusting.

I have a catalog with 28K of images so not unusually large I don't think. Seriously working on a move to multiple catalogs which is a pain to do but need to do something. It's completely unusable now. It takes 3-4X longer that it should have to get anything done as I have to sit and wait for it to catch up. I'm on tablet, i5, 8GB RAM (I know this isn't huge but I don't run anything else at the same time usually) But it did work acceptably before.

This is getting to be a repetitive story I personally am losing my patience with.

Report · Apr 21, 2019

Do you know if the system you are using is supported by the most recent version of Lightroom?

Anyone have a link for that currently . . . ?