USB SSD storage for LR & PS editing?

LongLensPhotography

LongLensPhotography

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LongLensPhotography
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My mac OS obviously runs on SSD but it's quite small and non-upgradeable 256GB. Next purchase realistically isn't likely to have any more...

Image library is ballooning over to nearly 4TB, half of it is client images. At some point I will have to start deleting old (2 yr?) projects but its still going to grow so that means old and cheap HDDs.

The question is would I get any significant editing or file opening or even export speed boost by moving working folders to external SSD (say cheap 128GB), and after that archiving them to the big HDDs?
 
I would expect an external SSD would be a lot faster than a Hard Drive, even more so if it and your mac support USB3
 
What you are suggesting will give you more speed but;

1/ I don't think 2 year old client images should be deleted from a business point of view.

2/ Why not buy another external hard drive or small server and export to that?
 
admirable said:
What you are suggesting will give you more speed but;

1/ I don't think 2 year old client images should be deleted from a business point of view.

2/ Why not buy another external hard drive or small server and export to that?
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1. Fair point. At what point, if ever do you delete them or just leave exported JPEGs?

2. I am not so much concerned about long term storage drives as much as the working speed hence the question about temporary small SSD. I only have 20-30GB free space on main drive so that's not of much use.
 
I have stuff going back over 10 years.

I use PC with Windows 10, I have a 1TB SSD for my main drive and the old SSD (250TB) as a temp storage drive, I also back everything up to External hard drives...........of which I have too many lol
 
I think I will move 2+ year client old projects to the two 2TB I have sitting in the draw collecting dust. I don't really need to have them connected and running.

Maybe it's worth a gamble with temp external SSD. Is anyone else doing it with any degrees of improvement?
 
LongLensPhotography said:
What's the max realistic read - write speed over USB3? I already have a pretty decent SSD-ready enclosure
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I’ve asked this in another forum and got the answer below, can’t tell you how true it is.
USB is rated at 5 Gigabits per second which turn out to be 640 MegaBYTES per second. Taking into account real world numbers, lets say those 640 MB/s turn out to be around 540 MB/s.
Now, a good SSD (write speeds vary depending on drive capacity, but are generally slower than read speeds) and so, the USB3 port is NOT a bottleneck in this specific case (SSD's 500 MB/s vs USB3's real world 540 MB/s).
 
I put a spare SSD into a cheap USB-C external caddy/box. Worked really quick and was much quicker than an external HDD so would recommend it for you.

You can get external Nas like devices which connects via usb which you can use HDD in with an SSD for cache which makes it large capacity & quick but cost is much higher than an external SSD in a caddy. (maybe overkill for what you want)
 
I am just trying to get photoshop read and save times down from nearly a minute to something more tolerable. I appreciate it may be actually more related to CPU bottleneck or even poor coding.

The big question is what size. Today I don't need much at all, but will I want it for other things very soon to warrant 1TB, which is just only £100 now outside of Apple cuckoo world.
 
LongLensPhotography said:
I am just trying to get photoshop read and save times down from nearly a minute to something more tolerable. I appreciate it may be actually more related to CPU bottleneck or even poor coding.

The big question is what size. Today I don't need much at all, but will I want it for other things very soon to warrant 1TB, which is just only £100 now outside of Apple cuckoo world.
Click to expand...
I would go as big as you can afford, empty space costs nothing and I’ve been looking for a while and general consensus I read is SSD likes space, don’t ask me why just what I’ve read.
I have a 1tb at work and it was almost empty, I started playing with with video (nothing major, just odds and sods) that 1tb soon got to 70% full.
 
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