Alan321
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 p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Seperate Drives for OS/Programs and Photos/LR Catalog? | |
One advantage of separating different functions onto separate drives (images, thumbnails, catalogs, caches, OS, other data, whatever else) is to avoid having a single drive doing different things at once, and so potentially speeding things up. This is especially beneficial with HDDs and with SSDs that share PCIe bandwidth. With HDDs, separate volumes are not as beneficial as separate HDDs because they share the same drive heads for all of the data reading and writing.
Another advantage is to speed up backups. Especially cloning of volumes or even whole drives for speedy recovery later on.
The benefits vary with the surrounding hardware. Some hindrances to the good plan are things like motherboard PCIe lane bottlenecks, or having no direct PCIe link between CPU and the relevant SSD(s) with the data. With PCIe links, this stuff is only apparent if you study the schematic of your motherboard.
With HDDs in particular, it may be preferable to avoid mixing any combination of cache data and image files and catalogs because that soon leads to fragmented files and/or non-contiguous files (shuffled files) that cause a slowing down of reads and writes. SSDs greatly reduce those slowdowns simply because there are no moving parts (drive heads) in an SSD, and so there are no delays for physical repositioning to occur. Even "lowly" SATA SSDs can offer a major advantage over HDDs just by eliminating head thrashing. The rest of their advantage comes from just being so much faster.
Another advantage of role separation is the ease with which individual drives can be cloned, externally (in a cloning dock, for example) or internally (using backup software), or simply replaced should the need/desire arise; all without dragging along irrelevant clutter.
While you are planning this stuff you might also consider the merits of having LrC set up to *not* put image metadata in the actual image files, because even the tiniest change to an image file triggers a need for a fresh backup that is far bigger than the change itself. In other words, let the LrC catalog do the heavy lifting instead, without having the OS rewrite whole image files for a few bytes of new metadata. Bit if you do this, don't let other photo software make the changes to image files too, or instead of LrC.
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