@Batteristafoto wrote:
Thank you for this answer. What I am wondering is if it's bad for the internal drive. I keep reading that the internal ssd should be used as little as possible in general.
That is based on the fact that the type of memory used in an SSD has a finite number of writes, which ultimately puts a hard limit on its lifetime. But to understand that lifetime fairly, you have to ask yourself how quickly you would actually get there.
The advice was passed around when SSDs were new and immature. But SSDs have come a long way, so today, it requires a much larger amount of data writing to wear out an SSD, so high that most people will never experience it. It’s generally accepted that you will probably choose to replace an SSD long before it reaches its write limit.
What about tests? One notable test was done a few years ago, where researchers measured the amount of data SSDs could take before they they finally stopped working:
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They’re all dead
Excerpt:
The SSD Endurance Experiment represents the longest test TR has ever conducted. It’s been a lot of work, but the results have also been gratifying. Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need.
The type of SSD used in today’s Macs has been in use since roughly 2015, and that gives you an anecdotal way of checking those results. Look through the Mac news for the last few years, as those SSDs pass 7 years in service: Is there any evidence, have there been any consistent reports, that the SSDs used starting around 2015 are now dying in large numbers due to “overuse” or “wearing out”? I don’t think that evidence exists. So even in computers where you can’t replace the SSD, most users need to upgrade the computer long before the SSD dies.
It’s not really something you have to worry about if you’re just photo editing, where 95% of the time the computer (and the SSD) waits for you to decide which button to push next. And when Lightroom Classic does write something it’s just updating a cache or preview of a few megabytes and then stops again to wait for you. Wearing out an SSD is a possibility if your computer edits video all day long, or some other activity where it writes very large amounts of data to storage, more or less continuously for many hours at a time, for many days at a time, for many years. That does not describe photo editing.
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