SSD speed requirement for lightroom

[nandbytes]

I am thinking of moving my LR workflow from internal to external drive if possible.
1) it'd be nice to move it to external drive for better portability, then I can use it on multiple devices and my missus can use it too. so we will want the catalogue on the external drive too.
2) SSD upgrades on macs are expensive so saving a few extra ££ is nice.

my iMac and MBP read/write speeds are in order of 2000MBps (give or take 200) according to benchmarks.

option 1 - The current cheaper fast option is a NVME with a caddy that'll do 10Gbps which is about equal 1000MBps. Half the speed of my internal drive.
option 2 - Then the next level up for NVMEs and caddys up to 40Gbps which is 4 times the bandwidth/speed but increase is price is equally large. So I am not so sure about these atm but could make for a nice upgrade one day.

Is 1000MBps good enough to host both the catalogues and images? Having catalogue on internal storage isn't end of the world if it will make a massive difference. Somehow I don't think I will notice LR being twice as slow but I have never tried this.... so would appreciate real user experiences on this matter.

 

[rob-nikon]

One of my friends who’s a great photographer and in IT advised me to keep the LR catalog on an SSD but the file files can go on a normal hard drive as lightroom doesn’t get any speed advantage of the RAWs being on an SSD.

I did at one point keep the Lightroom catalog and current working RAWs on an SSD and swapped them between laptop and desktop but I stopped that when I reused the SSD as the iMacs boot drive. It worked ok but I didn’t use it on the laptop enough to make it worth it. Exporting the new laptop catalog was just as easy and didn’t cost another SSD or USB port.

 

[nandbytes]

reading this seems to suggest there is some benefit to be had by placing both catalogue and images on the same drive and especially a SSD.

Performance of External Drives With Lightroom Classic - Photo Taco Podcast

More than 60 hours of testing different ways to have your Lightroom Classic catalog and photos stored on external drives proves that four features are 50% faster with your photos on an external SSD.

phototacopodcast.com

he is using a slower SSD in his tests too.

 

[Kaolin]

I agree with with Rob putting the files on SSD seems to make little difference, but having the catalogue on SSD is significantly faster. I got a new PC over the summer and it has a couple of NVME SSDs, a SATA SSD and a couple of HDD (I tend to keep different project of different disks). So I tried moving the files from NVME, to SSD to HHD and it makes no noticeable difference, although some HDDs are notably faster and quieter than others.

 

[nandbytes]

fair enough. could try it with one of my spinning disks I guess. I could just leave the catalogues on local disk which doesn't take a huge lot of space. I think previews takes the most space, wonder if you can move just that to the SSD?

 

[ancient_mariner]

My experience is different, and I find images open more quickly from SSD and editing seemed a little less laggy than if using HDD.

 

[LongLensPhotography]

My experience is different, and I find images open more quickly from SSD and editing seemed a little less laggy than if using HDD.

Certainly true, but it is a considerably smaller effect than moving catalogue from HDD to Ssd. When you have 8tb you hardly have much choice. I tend to import to catalogue Ssd and work from there and then move to HDD for storage. 250gb is plenty for that

 

[ancient_mariner]

I have the software & catalogue + previous 2 years images on SSD, with the remainder on a separate HDD. This reminds me that I need to do some housekeeping very soon.