Lightroom And External Drives

P

PDub

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Name
Philip
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As im rapidly filling up my hard drive and have a spare 320gb would moving my original RAW files to the external drive cause any performance issues in LR3?

My normal workflow is to copy from my CF card into My Pictures then add the files into LR3.

My catalogue will still be held on the local drive.

Thanks.

Phil.
 
It will Work.

However it will be considerably slower as the data transfer between either USB2 or Firewire is not as fast as it will be on your Local Harddrive.

I usually load Raw Files to Local Harddrive, Process them to Jpeg. Then Backup the Raw Files on the External Drive.

Everyone does it diffferently though??
 
PDub said:
Thanks Matt, i was looking at doing the same thing but i do tend to revisit some images in my library so moving the raws would prevent this i think.
Click to expand...

No it won't prevent it. It's fine.

Move the Raw file to External drive then next time you try opening it it will ask you to find missing files, then point to the new location on the external drive.

Takes 10 secs at the most ;)
 
Yup Yup! Externals tend to be slow and saving large RAW files is a drag on slow HDD. I bought a 2TB external only to find this is just not anywhere near as fast as my older internal. Two new 1 TB on the way to run in Raid 2, should have got three or four to run raid 5 or 6, with one drive for parity, would be even faster.
 
if youre worried about speed use eSATA drives or USB3 if you have the technology.

personally all of my RAW files sit on a NAS attached by 1gbps network with the catalogue locally (it cannot be located elsewhere officially) and its perfectly workable.
 
All my photo files are stored on an external LaCie drive and while LR can be slow on occasion, it's definitely workable.
 
*Babs said:
All my photo files are stored on an external LaCie drive and while LR can be slow on occasion, it's definitely workable.
Click to expand...

Thats interesting, i was going to use my LaCie external drive to do the same.

Thanks for the info.


I also was toying with the idea of using my 1tb NAS drive.
 
USB2 can outperform most hard drives, although it adds a bit more overhead than a sata connection. Don't worry, its not much.
 
I have 2 1tB external hard drives on which I store my RAW files, one is permanently switched on, the other only to back-up. Yes, it may be a little slower than accessing straight from the internal hd, but it means the internal doesn't fill up and if there's a crash, I don't lose either my images or catalogues.

I prefer not to store much on my internal hd, saving web jpgs etc on a thumb drive. Gives me lots of room on the internal hd for program files.
 
nano said:
USB2 can outperform most hard drives
Click to expand...

sorry but thats a little misleading interface speed and disk read/write specs are 2 different things, you will get better transfer/read/write speeds from a SATA/eSATA drive every time compared to a USB attached drive.

a quick google finds the following test for example:

Test 1: Copying a single 5.7GB avi file between the Lacie and my internal Raptor comparing eSATA with USB2 both reading and writing to the Lacie.

Test 2: Copying 811 smaller files in 2 directories, totalling 4.07GB between the Lacie Drive and my internal Raptor comparing eSATA with USB both reading and writing to the Lacie.

Test 1 - eSATA Write 1m 32sec, Read 1m 31sec
Test 1 - USB2 Write 3m 10sec, Read 3m 39sec

Test 2 - eSATA Write 1m 00sec, Read 1m 20sec
Test 2 - USB2 Write 2m 57sec, Read 1m 51sec
Click to expand...

burst read USB2 isnt much behind SATA but anything else SATA blows it out of the water.

generally USB2 will top out around 30mb/s transfer speed, SATA will go upto 60mb/s.

and thats before we even get into the fact the USB bus will proportion bandwidth between devices connected ;)
 
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I use external 1tb WD drive hooked to my iMac, and can't really see any difference of importing and working with RAWs, from when the files used to sit on my internal drive. Unless I'm missing something...
 
Agreed

Recently moved my catalog and photos to an external drive and backed up to another external drive and 2 NAS drives - I guess it depends on the connection?

USB2 / USB3 / Firewire 400 / Firewire 800
 
nano said:
USB2 can outperform most hard drives, although it adds a bit more overhead than a sata connection. Don't worry, its not much.
Click to expand...

No it cannot. :D
 
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