Will an SSD drive speed up elements with a large number of photos & Videos

[DVision123]

Hi I currently have elements installed on my SSD drive and my photos/Videos installed on an external HHD Drive. I am finding its quite slow at times accessing the photos and i am oftem waiting for photos or videos to open and load. SSD drives have now come down in price so i am considering a 2TB external drive with USB3 and placing all my photos/Videos on that. My question is will this speed things up for me? If it will make no difference then its not worth changing. Thanks

[Greg_S.]

What OS and version of Elements are you using?

Are you talking about performance in the Organizer or the Editor. 

[DVision123]

Hi Greg, I am HP I7 running windows 10 and the latest verion of Elements 2020. The program is on a 256GB SSD and the photos and video is on an external HHD USB drive. I am wanting to know whne in the organizer, sorting and scrolling through my photos. Selecting photos and selecting videos to watch. I have over 27000 phots and videos. Soemtimes it just hangs and the circlule goes round and i have to wait from 10 seconds to a few minuites for it to load. I scroll down sometimes and it just hangs. I have plenty of disk space and keep it as clean as i can with optimizing software. Editor seems to work fine. Thanks

[Greg_S.]

Is it possible that media analysis is interfering with performance in the Organizer?  Do you have face recognition and auto-creations turned on?  Try turning them off.

If that is not the cause of your slowdowns, I'm not sure that adding an SSD drive for your media files will speed things up.  I have a very fast M.2  SSD card for my program files and catalog, but my media files are on regular internal platter drives.  While previewing a video in the Organizer can take a noticeable time to load the player, most other operations are very fast (and my catalog contains over 180,000 files). 

I will be interested to hear whether anyone thinks using an SSD drive for media files will speed up performance, as I'm in the process of building a new computer for myself.  Please let us know about the effects of media analysis on your catalog, and if you decide to go through with the new SSD drive.

[Greg_S.]

I've just taken a look at some of the related conversations in the Lightroom forum, and the consensus over there seems to be that putting media files on an SSD does not improve performance.  But, as they say, your mileage may vary.

[MichelBParis]

I don't use a SSD myself but I will ceertainly consider it when I'll have to change computer. I agree with Greg that there is a consensus in forums about storing data on conventional drives; however there is also a consensus about storing the scratch disk on the SSD, which in turn calls for a lot of RAM (minimum 16GB in my view).

[imjack2]

I have my Windows OS on a 500GB SSD, thus the Program Files and ProgramData folders are situated on the SSD drive. This includes of course also my Catalog Folder! Working with the Organizer is very fast and can I zip from beginning to end in less than a second. My catalog has 50k+ entries.
My photos and videos are on a fast 2TB HDD and is the 1-3 second delay for loading the image or clip into the editor not a problem for me. Also the less than 1 second delay while loading a maximum zoom image into the organizer is hardly noticeable.
So I don't see any real advantage of having all your images and videos on a (still) expensive SSD.

[Test Screen Name]

Do check the current disk is plugged into a USB3 socket (usually has some blue detail to show it is USB3).

Also consider using Task Manager or Performance Meter to see how much the disk is being used at these times, or whether it might be maxing out on CPU or memory.

[DVision123]

Thanks.. yes its plugged into USB3. Face reconition is off.. Playijng video through organizer is also slow and when it works it plays but the video stops and the audio continues. I have to locate the file in windows and play it then it plays fine. Do you think moving to the other files that are in the folder with my videos to the SSD will make a difference and if I do will it still work.. Im a little hessident to try incase I screw up the database.

[DVision123]

BTW. When I select a Video the CPU goest to 30% and memeory 65% then it becomes unresponsive most of the time and i have to restart organizer.