Hard Drive confusion

[gadgeteer]

I currently have a slim 27" imac with a normal HDD. I'd love to fit a SSD to it but don't want to invalidate the Applecare warranty so holding off.

Lightroom and Photoshop can be particularly slow especially if I am doing a large export.

I guess the question is a USB3 SSD disk faster than a 7200RPM HDD connected via SATA?

I am thinking of basically storing my LR catalog and the weddings RAW's I'm currently working on. Once i've delivered the set to the client I'll happily store the files on my fileserver.

Thanks

 

[neil_g]

Keep the cat on the ssd. And if you can afford it get a big enough ssd to have your working raw set on it too.

Otherwise usb3 should be plenty fast enough for raw. But isn't as fast as some Sata versions (I.e sata3 5 vs 6gbps).

 

[SandyMcClure]

Yes. An SSD has a read / write speed usually about 200 - 500 Mb/Sec where as a HDD usually works in the 50 - 120 Mb/s range. Transfer rates of USB and SATA essentially become moot as they are both much faster than the read / write speeds of the drive in question

 

[shannensdaddy]

Hi
Would it not be a lot more cost efficient to buy a NAS( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage )configured with 2 drives on your home network. (SSDs are still about 7 to 8 times more expensive per unit of storage than HDDs. taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive).

 

[miker]

But a NAS would be slower again, so the wrong thing when the question is about speed.

 

[neil_g]

Although usable to host raw over gigabit. Obviously it's not going to be as fast as usb3.