Recommendation for external hard drive for use with Lightroom

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trican

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Hi all,

Hopefully this is a suitable forum ... Mods feel free to move if not.

My macbook pro with 500Gb of space is on its knees due to my large Lightroom catalogs (in total probably 700-800Gb). Previously I started a new catalog every now and then, and moved the old catalog with RAW files to cloud storage to free up space on my hard drive (well SSD drive). This doesn't seem like the best approach now, so I think simply using an external USB drive might be a better option. Does anyone have any recommendations for a reliable external hard drive? Probably 2-4Tb in size, and I think I'd like one that is reasonably compact and portable, yet is fast enough not to slow down my work flow.

Thanks!
 
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I've been using Western Digital My Passport Ultras - they're USB 3.0 and bus powered. The largest I have is 2.0TB. No issues to date... touch wood. Major benefit for me is that they're small and ultra-portable.

If you're looking for server-grade reliability, then look at NAS (eg. A Synology Diskstation with a couple of WD Red drives tucked inside). The only disadvantage to NAS is one of network speed. I'm sure there are RAID based USB drives about but, I haven't ventured down that path.

For me, a combination of a pocketable USB drive and a NAS for backups works nicely.
 
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The LaCie drives have thunderbolt connections, very fast but I don't know how reliable. Beware of using NAS drives with LR, you can keep the photos but not the catalogue on a NAS.
 
Seems like I can get a 2Tb Western Digital Passport Ultra for £75 - this looks like a good deal.

At this stage one other thing I'm tempted by is the Western Digital Passport Wifi, as the name suggests it has wifi built-in, as well as an SD card reader (reviews generally say very slow reader). I wonder could that open up an interesting work flow, whereby the automatic SD backup could copy the files onto the external drive and then a Lightroom import is just moving the files on the same physical disk over wifi (which should still be very fast?). And then I wonder could Lightroom editing be done over wifi, which should be fast and also removes the requirement for the external drive to be tethered to my macbook. If anyone has one of these I'd be really interested to hear how you use it

Many thanks!
 
DonnaM said:
The LaCie drives have thunderbolt connections, very fast but I don't know how reliable. Beware of using NAS drives with LR, you can keep the photos but not the catalogue on a NAS.
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How do you mean you can't store the catalogue? I have mine on a nas?
 
DonnaM said:
The LaCie drives have thunderbolt connections, very fast but I don't know how reliable. Beware of using NAS drives with LR, you can keep the photos but not the catalogue on a NAS.
Click to expand...
You can. The catalogue can reside wherever you like (ie. on any mounted volume). It is, however, perhaps better to have it reside on the local drive - especially with an MBP with a flash drive.
 
trican said:
Seems like I can get a 2Tb Western Digital Passport Ultra for £75 - this looks like a good deal.

At this stage one other thing I'm tempted by is the Western Digital Passport Wifi, as the name suggests it has wifi built-in, as well as an SD card reader (reviews generally say very slow reader). I wonder could that open up an interesting work flow, whereby the automatic SD backup could copy the files onto the external drive and then a Lightroom import is just moving the files on the same physical disk over wifi (which should still be very fast?). And then I wonder could Lightroom editing be done over wifi, which should be fast and also removes the requirement for the external drive to be tethered to my macbook. If anyone has one of these I'd be really interested to hear how you use it
Click to expand...

There's a noticeable drop in performance if you use WiFi as opposed to a locally connected volume. You'll have plenty of time for tea each time you import photos into Lr as it builds the catalogue and cache.
 
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