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External SSD

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Colin Grant

Active Member
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
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512
Location
Norfolk
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
10.1.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 11 Big Sur
Have just been given an external SSD for my iMac. At present everything to do with LrC is on my internal Fusion drive. Would there be any advantages in moving some things to the SSD? Maybe all images, the cache, catalogue etc. Performance of Lr is not too bad actually but if I can speed it up a bit it would help. Sorry if this is a bit woolly but this is one area of Lr where I get completely confused.

Thank you.
 
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It depends upon the Bandwidth of the connection. Typically the buss mounted drive will be the fastest drive. Thunderbolt3 connected drives are as fast or faster than the buss mounted internal drive. So if your EHD is connected vis TB3 to your Mac, then there are some advantages.

Your MacOS is constantly reading to and writing to many files at once. You can check using the Activity ,omit to get an idea of how many file handles might be in use by looking at the thread count. If all of those files are on the same disk, then the traffic has to go through the same pipe (port) One disk drive can only write or read to one file at a time although it can do this very quickly. Add another disk and you double the number of read/writes the CPU can handle simultaneously. However if your EHD is connected by USB2 or even USB3, the slowdown on that connection versus the faster buss mounted disk can wipe out any advantage of additional read/writes the CPU can handle.
 
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Thanks Cletus. The external I have been given is a USB3 SSD so perhaps no merit in moving the catalogue across.
 
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It still might be useful to hold your infrequently accessed image folders. Performance is not so important there the images that are no longer being actively processed.
 
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