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JoeB94
Known Participant
August 24, 2020
Question

Photo processing off an external SSD drive?

  • August 24, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 6821 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 can tell you that I keep my original raw files in an external USB 3 Gen 2 10 Gb/sec enclosure with fast hard drives in it, connected by USB-C, and for me that’s fine in Lightroom Classic. A hard-working high-volume pro with high megapixel cameras might disagree with me, but since you said this was more of a weekend/hobby thing you should not have to spend too much money.

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