• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

Hard disks exclusive for lightroom

Status
Not open for further replies.

alaios

Active Member
Joined
Jun 27, 2014
Messages
455
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
recent updating all the time
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
Hi all,
I am asking for some hardware recommendations. Right now I have my cataloge and my previews running on my main ssd hard disk. As you know this does not take a lot of space.
All my photos I have on external 4 TB disks that I hope they work over usb 3.0 and not usb 2.0 (The disks are usb 3.0 connected to usb 3.0 but you can never be sure with these things).

I want to buy a hard disk to speed up the process of the editing. A 4 TB SSD is just too expensive.
1. Are there speedy solutions that do not cost as much as the SSD and are not as slow as 5400 RPM?
2. Will a normal hard disk conencted to the motherboard be faster than an external usb 3.0 disk? If yes that I can buy one of the fasted SATA Disks that are not SSD.

What will you recommend?
Thanks
Alex
 
Right now I have my cataloge and my previews running on my main ssd hard disk. As you know this does not take a lot of space.
I'm surprised you said that, typically the previews are quite large. If by chance they just haven't grown do be aware they grow over time.

As to the USB nature, this is a very handy utility:

View any installed/connected USB device on your system

It shows everything in the USB database, whether connected or not. When connected, it shows the USB version and lots of other info. A LOT more info than you will actually want to know, but you can definitely see whether they are working at USB2 or USB3 or USB3.1 speeds.

While there are many operations where the image database storage speed is relevant, I think most human wait time that irritates people is not the image storage, but other stuff -- CPU in particular. Now if you are doing a lot of external editing (out to photoshop, back into LR, back and forth) that may be different.

Since you have SSD now, put a few images on the SSD drive and edit, and see how much difference it makes for you.
 
Thanks all for the replies.
@Photocitizen: I also know that usb3 regardless of the speed is one file at a time. I would expect when selecting multiple photos in lightroom and editing them together an internal sata disk to be just faster. I am thinking to keep my catalogue in ssd. All my photos (first copy) in the internal disk and then keep the two usb 3.0 disks for the backups.

Let me know your thoughts.
 
I also know that usb3 regardless of the speed is one file at a time. I would expect when selecting multiple photos in lightroom and editing them together an internal sata disk to be just faster. I am thinking to keep my catalogue in ssd. All my photos (first copy) in the internal disk and then keep the two usb 3.0 disks for the backups.
I am not Photocitizen, but that first sentence caught me -- what do you mean? That USB3 limits you to moving one file at a time? It doesn't. I just set three 2GB files copying to a USB3 EHD and they all copied at the same time (about 1/3 the speed each of course).

But personally I always recommend internal drives -- they are faster, they are more secure (in the sense of accidental disconnects, bad cables, etc.), and user error is dramatically reduced.

And I switched to all SSD about 4 years ago (except backups, NAS, etc.); quieter, less power, MUCH faster. But it's a one time price. Before deciding the price is too high look at all the camera gear you have to feed it, add up that price. :eek:

But some people, especially those who prefer using a laptop, internal may not be an option.
 
@alaios That's pretty close to what I do.

If you ever need to figure out which hard drive or other component to buy, I suggest visiting PugetSystems.com. They build Windows computers specifically for running Lightroom. They have a blog that explains performance effects of various components. If you go to their configuration page, you can see all the components that they use in their systems.

If you can afford it, buy a system from them. You won't regret it. My wife did that. I built my own PC, but I based my system on the components they recommend.
 
@alaios That's pretty close to what I do.

If you ever need to figure out which hard drive or other component to buy, I suggest visiting PugetSystems.com. They build Windows computers specifically for running Lightroom. They have a blog that explains performance effects of various components. If you go to their configuration page, you can see all the components that they use in their systems.

If you can afford it, buy a system from them. You won't regret it. My wife did that. I built my own PC, but I based my system on the components they recommend.
Agree with the suggestion for Pugetsystems. When I built my newest desktop, I re-used pretty much everything except the motherboard/CPU/RAM. But if I were starting from scratch and didn't wnat to build myself, I would definitely get a system from them instead of one of the mass market vendors like HP or Lenovo.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top