Selecting an External drive in Photoshop save window takes forever to load

But I would still ask: if they don't mean external drives when they use the words "removable" and "peripheral", what do they mean? What is not a "local drive"?

By @D Fosse

This is about industry terminology, which is not necessarily known by users. And also terminology that describes a technology that is in much less use than it was 20 years ago.

(The following explanation is not intended to over-explain just to those in this thread, because I’m sure some of you are veterans who know about and maybe used these technologies. The history and details in this explanation are more for those younger or newer to the industry who read this thread with the same question but aren’t aware of the historical context.)

In the 1980s through roughly the 2000s, if someone wanted to move their graphics project to another computer or send it to the prepress house, what do you do? Floppy disks are too small, hard drives are internal, or, external hard drives are expensive and difficult to move between systems because of issues such as SCSI termination and SCSI connector variations. USB and writable optical media were not yet available, and the Internet wasn’t mature or fast enough, so you were stuck with SCSI drives.

To solve this, it became popular to use removable media. They were cartridges you could remove from the expensive enclosure. These cartridges had a much higher capacity than a floppy disk, cost much less than a whole external SCSI hard drive, and as long as the person receiving it had the same drive, all you have to do is send them the affordable cartridge.

And so we saw removable media cartridge systems take over the graphic design world, such as the SyQuest, Zip, and Jaz drives.

When Adobe is talking about removable media here, they are not talking about the fact that you can “remove” an external SSD using today’s very easy method of unmounting volumes and unplugging USB or Thunderbolt cables. Adobe is talking about removable media as media you can remove from its enclosure. Removing not the entire enclosure, just the media.

In a sense, this is another symptom of many Adobe tech articles not being updated, using language that makes assumptions that an audience today might not know about. “Removable media” was a very clear term in 1994, it meant a cartridge. Now, external drives are so cheap and easy to disconnect that nobody bothers with cartridges any more…SyQuest, Zip, and Jaz are all dead. Adobe still uses the term, which is technically OK because some obscure cartridge systems do still exist for niche uses, but the creative community today generally does not use what has traditionally been called “removable media.”

What is not a local drive? Here, I think Adobe means, in terms of what they support:

Local: Any direct attached storage (e.g., USB, Thunderbolt, SATA, probably eSATA…), but excluding removable media which are not supported.

Not local: Basically “connected over a network.” That includes network attached storage (NAS), network shares like other computers, and cloud storage. (Although of course some Creative Cloud storage methods are supported, such as Libraries and Cloud Documents.)