LR Performance: Which hard disk needs more speed?

[marcusd]

Hi,

Suppose we had three hard disks A, B, C installed in our (personal) computer. A was faster than B which was faster than C. Faster in terms of read/write performance due to controller interface, hard disk layout etc.

We reckon it made sense to install the OS, the catalog and the image files on different hard disks.

Would anybody know which of the three should hold the OS, the catalog, the images - so that we had the best performance?

LR2 with 4'.''' images on WinXP Pro on an Intel QuadCore with 4GB RAM and (non-RAID) SATA2 hard disks but LR2 still doesn't feel comfortable enough when exporting or importing via internal hard disks.

Thanks,
Marcus

 

[edgley]

Have a look for Intel Matrix Raid.
It runs in software and can give you the disk boost you are looking for; I used to use when I was a PC'er.

 

[Brad Snyder]

Marcus, I haven't seen that fine a cut on it. You'll be doing fine, if you get these three different things on three different drives.

1) Windows page/swap file
2) LR Catalog/previews
3) Image source files.

From what I know, I can't speculate which is better on the faster drive. I expect that
the catalog is transaction/seek speed (many small read/writes) orientented, and the previews and source files are bandwidth oriented, (large read/writes and transfers).

I believe on the Mac there's a workaround to also split the preview cache from the catalog. If I recollect correctly, there's a kludge to do it on Windows also, but I forget the details. I think Sean McCormack was my reference on that issue.

If you fool around and figure out the best way to go, be sure to let us know.