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Batteristafoto
Batteristafoto
Known Participant
May 19, 2022
Question

Working with Lightroom on internal drive bad?

  • May 19, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 514 views

Hi friends. I have heard that running lightroom off your internal drive is bad for the SSD. Is this true? Is it better to run off a usb external drive or thundebolt 2 drive?

 

Thx in advanced for yout thoughts 

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2 replies

JP Hess
JP Hess
Inspiring
May 21, 2022

My "main" internal hard drive is a SSD  And I have Lightroom Classic and Photoshop installed that drive. My images are imported to a spinning drive. There really isn't any benefit to having the images on a SSD because once they are imported and previews are generated that images themselves are not accessed. Nothing is written to the master images under normal circumstances. My configuration has proven to work well for me for quite some time.

    KR Seals
    Community Expert
    KR SealsCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 19, 2022

    No, that is not true. Lightroom Classic should be run on your internal SSD because it is almost always the fastest drive in a system. To save space on the internal drive, you can have your imported images saved to an external drive of adequate size. SSD is preferable but spinning hard drive will work just fine. That's because Lightroom Classic does not access the original image files after import except for printing and exporting. (Maybe a few more things like making previews when you zoom into 100%)

    Note: The image files are not located in the Lightroom Catalog.

    Ken Seals - Nikon Z 9, Z 8, 14mm-800mm. Computer Win 11 Pro, I7-14700K, 64GB, RTX3070TI. Travel machine: 2021 MacBook Pro M1 MAX 64GB. All Adobe apps.
      Batteristafoto
      BatteristafotoAuthor
      Known Participant
      May 19, 2022

      Very interesting and great answer thank you! 

      Conrad_C
      Community Expert
      Conrad_CCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      May 20, 2022

      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.


      I should add that there is some real advice about SSDs that you should follow and pass on: 

       

      Never let an SSD get close to full.

       

      A nearly full SSD won’t have room to do its necessary housekeeping to stay fast, so it could slow down the SSD and therefore everything you run on it. Buy an SSD capacity that lets you maintain a lot of free space at all times, to leave room for when various applications (including Lightroom Classic and Photoshop) need to set up large temp/cache/preview files.

       

      For some people, that is the reason to not keep their photos on the internal SSD: If they bought a Mac with internal storage capacity that would be too full if they moved all their photos into it, then they should keep those photos on external storage.

       

      So there can be a reason to avoid the internal SSD, but the reason is not wearing out the SSD, it’s needing to maintain enough free space. Which also means, if you can keep all your photos, with room to grow, on the internal SSD and there is still 100–200GB or more of free space available, then don’t worry about it, go ahead and use the internal SSD.

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