p.1 #2 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
For me, performance is everything. Highest performance is internal drives, not external. I am a Windows guy so, internal NVME drives, latest generation supported by your motherboard, are the fastest performers. I would never use an external drive except for portability or bulk storage.
A minimum Windows configuration is an NVME for the operating system and programs, a 2nd for work storage (photos, editing...). I added a third NVME drive as a scratch/temporary drive for sorting/culling and other stuff.
SATA solid state are good but the NVME is way faster. You can use SATA for bulk storage... best to store/copy libraries out of your computer on a NAS or other off-site storage. Spinners... ugh...
p.1 #3 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
Wow, back in August I bought a 4TB WD SN850X for around $250.... I put that in an ACASIS TBU-405 enclosure and routinely hit the maximum TB 3/4 throughput when doing sustained data transfers. If you buy a pre-made external SSD, usually the connection/interface type will be the bottleneck. But lower priced SSDs will also throttle significantly once their cache/buffer fills, with the lower priced options having smaller caches. This will be most relevant when doing sustained data transfers. For short read/write bursts, it'll likely have less impact.
In this respect, for general photo editing in Lightroom, I found 10Gb/s USB (about 1GB/s) throughput wasn't a bottleneck. At least for what I was doing. But if you routinely shoot a lot of content and have hundreds of GBs of files to move around, faster will save time when it comes to data transfers.
What drives are at the feature and price points you stated?
The 'problem' with pre-made drives is you don't know what specific NVMe stick is in a given drive, making it difficult to figure out performance for the money you're spending. If you just get an NVMe stick and put it in an enclosure, there are a number of sites with reviews and performance benchmarks for comparison, making it easier to research what level of performance you're getting from a given drive.
p.1 #4 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
Bruce n Philly wrote:
For me, performance is everything. Highest performance is internal drives, not external. I am a Windows guy so, internal NVME drives, latest generation supported by your motherboard, are the fastest performers. I would never use an external drive except for portability or bulk storage.
A minimum Windows configuration is an NVME for the operating system and programs, a 2nd for work storage (photos, editing...). I added a third NVME drive as a scratch/temporary drive for sorting/culling and other stuff.
SATA solid state are good but the NVME is way faster. You can use SATA for bulk storage... best to store/copy libraries out of your computer on a NAS or other off-site storage. Spinners... ugh...
For OS / Program drives, I completely agree with going as fast as possible. For my photo catalogs, I have found external SSDs have worked well since I gain portability, and some redundancy of not having all my images on a single drive / machine and not on a drive that is constantly powered on. Then I back up the drive to a spinning drive for backup / longer term storage. Granted, if 8tb or 16tb SSDs come down in price in the future, I may be tempted to consolidate.
I started doing the math, and a 100mb raw file at 1000 MB/s will take about 100ms to load. At 4000 MB/s it would take about 25ms. At 6000 MB/s it would take about 17ms. Which got me wondering, is 83ms of savings (100ms - 17ms) worth the 50% price increase of $400 vs $600 for normal photo editing? Admittedly, if I were working with timlapses with 1,000s of images or lots of 8k video, I probably wouldn't be asking this question and just going with the fastest option. But 95% of the time, I feel like I am not dealing with enough images that 83ms of savings will add up to a noticeable difference. But LR could definitely be doing something under the cover that makes disk speed more important than my basic math.
rscheffler wrote:
Wow, back in August I bought a 4TB WD SN850X for around $250.... I put that in an ACASIS TBU-405 enclosure and routinely hit the maximum TB 3/4 throughput when doing sustained data transfers. If you buy a pre-made external SSD, usually the connection/interface type will be the bottleneck. But lower priced SSDs will also throttle significantly once their cache/buffer fills, with the lower priced options having smaller caches. This will be most relevant when doing sustained data transfers. For short read/write bursts, it'll likely have less impact.
Wow, to bad I am only getting close to needing more storage now. Currently, a 4TB WD SN850X is going for about 480.
rscheffler wrote:
In this respect, for general photo editing in Lightroom, I found 10Gb/s USB (about 1GB/s) throughput wasn't a bottleneck. At least for what I was doing. But if you routinely shoot a lot of content and have hundreds of GBs of files to move around, faster will save time when it comes to data transfers.
That has been my experience too. I have been using USB SSDS at 10Gb/s for about 6 years now. But now I have a newer computer with faster ports, which got me curious.
rscheffler wrote:
What drives are at the feature and price points you stated?
The 'problem' with pre-made drives is you don't know what specific NVMe stick is in a given drive, making it difficult to figure out performance for the money you're spending. If you just get an NVMe stick and put it in an enclosure, there are a number of sites with reviews and performance benchmarks for comparison, making it easier to research what level of performance you're getting from a given drive.
If I go faster than 10Gb/s I am going to go with an enclosure and a Samsung drive. The only pre packaged SSD I am finding in stock at 40 Gb/s is the SanDisk 4TB Extreme PRO USB4, and even though it's a new model, I don't really trust SanDisk after they never really addressed their high failure rate.
p.1 #5 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
I use NVME attached via TB4 on my Mac for virtually seamless I/O while editing. I keep a year or so handy and move the older sessions off to more economical large capacity spinners for long term storage. In this, I have super fast capability with my current working files nad ready access when/if needed to historical images.
p.1 #6 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
I just purchased a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure Samsung 8TB 9100 PRO PCIe 5.0 M.2 Internal SSD. I never get the rated speed and I am currently limited to Thunderbolt 4 speeds, but my images are on one external drive and catalog on another. If you are processing smaller libraries and less data, then this is overkill.
p.1 #7 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
PS: Understand that NVME is (a lot) faster than an SSD. NVME via TB attaches directly to the PCIe bus, and gen 4/5 can achieve up to 7 GB/s, while SSD is a flash device and operates at SATA III type speeds limited to 550 MB/s.
p.1 #8 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
Most editing software uses your local disk and/or RAM as scratch space while working. PS prefs can be configured to use other attached storage as well. The storage location of the original file is only read once to retrieve it. So unless you're performing high volume batch processes on multiple files with lots of file system read/write ops, there's not much to be gained from using high performance disk for external storage. The local disk is always faster. You'll usually have a bottleneck at whatever your connection is to the external storage.
p.1 #9 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
Are you guys working on just one computer?
I've been consolidating multiple desktops (from previous laptops, current laptop, and the desktop) to multiple large external SATA drives. The lag (I assume this is disk latency) can be 10s of seconds with a new Windows mini computer. It's frustrating, but I assume it's the external drives.
In Photoshop, I don't notice any lag. I'm working on an external Crucial 4tb flash drive (usb-c-supposedly 1050 mb/s) since I'll work on the same folders on a both a laptop (in the living room with the family) and desktop (locked away in the office). I've looked a bit at a flash NAS using NVMe, but I assume the laptop WIFI would be slower than a usb-c flash drive. Still, it would simplify data transfers.
Comments welcome on how you've solved the issue of multiple computers. I'm not much of a computer guy.
p.1 #10 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
jay w wrote:
Are you guys working on just one computer?
Snip
Comments welcome on how you've solved the issue of multiple computers. I'm not much of a computer guy.
As I indicated earlier, I work on a Mac Studio and MacBook Pro. That TB4 NVME drive allows me to work my current working images on either machine and edit it seamlessly, and/or pick up where I left on the other machine. With that drive connected, I can’t detect any speed difference between it and having the images on my machine’s internal drive. If I run a BlackMagic Speed test, the system shows the internal I/O faster, but both are so fast I can’t see or feel any difference in use. FWIW for myself, YMMV.
p.1 #11 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
Disk speed matters a lot when it's the bottleneck in your processing. However, sometimes it isn't an issue. For example, opening/saving a large PSB file with compression. Here the bottleneck is the time for the CPU to decode the compression when opening the file (or re-encode the file when saving). It doesn't matter much if it's on a 6000 MB/s internal NVME or 150MB/s external drive.
p.1 #12 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
It would help to know what OS you're using and what are your I/O requirements. They are usually the limitations in terms of operating speeds. You don't need to waste $ on a super fast NvME card and a 80 Gbps enclosure if your I/O is only USB 3.2 or an earlier generation TB.
p.1 #13 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
armd wrote:
It would help to know what OS you're using and what are your I/O requirements. They are usually the limitations in terms of operating speeds. You don't need to waste $ on a super fast NvME card and a 80 Gbps enclosure if your I/O is only USB 3.2 or an earlier generation TB.
I'm trying to use a single external flash drive (usb4) on both machines. Both are Windows 11 and the desktop is a new mini (Geekom AX8max) and has a 3 drives (besides the flash drive) hooked up to usb 3.2 jacks as I'm consolidating desktops. My monitor(s) are hooked up to hdmi.
I'm thinking that just moving a flash drive back and forth is probably good enough.
p.1 #14 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
jay w wrote:
I'm trying to use a single external flash drive (usb4) on both machines. Both are Windows 11 and the desktop is a new mini (Geekom AX8max) and has a 3 drives (besides the flash drive) hooked up to usb 3.2 jacks as I'm consolidating desktops. My monitor(s) are hooked up to hdmi.
I'm thinking that just moving a flash drive back and forth is probably good enough.
Thanks.
If you’re using Windows and USB 3.2 gen 2 then the fastest possible transfer speed is 10Gbps. Gen1 is half that. Don’t waste your money on anything faster. You could buy an inexpensive 10Gbps NVME housing and an inexpensive card (good luck finding one) or something like a crucial x9.
p.1 #15 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
armd wrote:
It would help to know what OS you're using and what are your I/O requirements. They are usually the limitations in terms of operating speeds. You don't need to waste $ on a super fast NvME card and a 80 Gbps enclosure if your I/O is only USB 3.2 or an earlier generation TB.
In my case, I can now go up to USB 4 or Thunderbolt 5, which is what sparked my curiosity after coming from USB 3.2.
p.1 #16 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
jay w wrote:
I've been consolidating multiple desktops (from previous laptops, current laptop, and the desktop) to multiple large external SATA drives. The lag (I assume this is disk latency) can be 10s of seconds with a new Windows mini computer. It's frustrating, but I assume it's the external drives.
I've added a bunch of 16, 18 and 20TB drives recently (last couple years or so) and I'm not sure if they're slower to spin up than past 4 and 8TB drives, but it sure is noticeable when otherwise working with external NVMe drives. The HDDs are in multi-drive enclosures and often a bunch are mounted, but the system will let them spin down and 'sleep' after a period of non-use. So whenever I click on a file or folder on one of those idle drives, the whole system pretty much waits for them to all spin up again. And with them being in a multi-drive enclosure, they spin up sequentially rather than all at once, which compounds the delay.
For current projects and anything that will be edited, everything is on NVMes.
For working across multiple computer systems, I have a 'current projects' NVMe that I move around. I also make a Lightroom catalog specifically for each project and store it in each project's folder on the NVMe.
For a while I had dedicated an older laptop to act as a file server. It was connected to the external drives and was in turn accessed over my local network, via gigabit ethernet, by my main editing system. Gigabit ethernet is roughly 100MB/s which is 1/10 what 10Gb USB does, and was fast enough for working in Lightroom. I didn't try it over wifi. But this was also ~3+ years ago before LR went more heavily into AI masking, NR, etc. Not sure if those types of features impact speed when working over a network.
p.1 #17 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
Jack Flesher wrote:
PS: Understand that NVME is (a lot) faster than an SSD. NVME via TB attaches directly to the PCIe bus, and gen 4/5 can achieve up to 7 GB/s, while SSD is a flash device and operates at SATA III type speeds limited to 550 MB/s.
Perhaps not the best source to quote, but Wilkipedia states that, “ SSDs come in various form factors and interface types, including SATA, PCIe, and NVMe, each offering different levels of performance.”
Perhaps more to your point, I hope that LRC is not regularly relying on flash devices for active editing.
p.1 #18 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
bwcolor wrote:
Perhaps not the best source to quote, but Wilkipedia states that, “ SSDs come in various form factors and interface types, including SATA, PCIe, and NVMe, each offering different levels of performance.”
Perhaps more to your point, I hope that LRC is not regularly relying on flash devices for active editing.
My point is that about the only external memory storage capable of running large volumes of data I/O anywhere near as fast as current internal NVME drive speeds, is NVME on a fast bus. And at present, the fastest buses are TB4/5 or USB4/USB4v2.
Speaking for myself, I am currently using an NVME gen 4 on TB4 external and I cannot perceive any significant difference between it and working off my internal drive for imaging. And thus, I’m in no rush to pay the current cost delta for TB5 speed, though respect others needs may vary, especially if they’re doing massive still volume or video.
p.1 #19 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
DWOfPaul wrote:
I was wondering if anyone has experience or an opinion on how much external SSD speed matters for photo editing.
Currently, I am finding that for a 4TB hard drive:
Around 1000 MB/s is about $400
Around 4000 MB/s is about $500
Around 6000 MB/s is about $600
Is the performance difference noticeable enough that it's worth the increased cost and size for a faster drive?
Just regarding the general notion of needing the very fastest storage speed matters…
… it matters not all that much in absolute photographic terms, and it sometimes seems like it is more about saying one has the fastest thing than about any objective need.
Most of us are typically working one photograph at a time, and even when the differences between the fastest and slowest load or save times might be large enough to barely be measured in seconds, the proportion of our work time accounted for by these differences in minuscule.
I’ll make an exception for people whose work process might frequently involve opening and processing huge numbers of files simultaneously and perhaps applying complex edits to them in large groups.
p.1 #20 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
gdanmitchell wrote:
Just regarding the general notion of needing the very fastest storage speed matters…
… it matters not all that much in absolute photographic terms, and it sometimes seems like it is more about saying one has the fastest thing than about any objective need.
Most of us are typically working one photograph at a time, and even when the differences between the fastest and slowest load or save times might be large enough to barely be measured in seconds, the proportion of our work time accounted for by these differences in minuscule.
I’ll make an exception for people whose work process might frequently involve opening and processing huge numbers of files simultaneously and perhaps applying complex edits to them in large groups....Show more →
That was my thinking too, but I figured with LR, I never know what it may be doing under the covers. So maybe it's doing something with file I/O that matters more than I would think at first glance.
To quote myself from a few posts ago: I started doing the math, and a 100mb raw file at 1000 MB/s will take about 100ms to load. At 4000 MB/s it would take about 25ms. At 6000 MB/s it would take about 17ms. Which got me wondering, is 83ms of savings (100ms - 17ms) worth the 50% price increase of $400 vs $600 for normal photo editing? Admittedly, if I were working with timlapses with 1,000s of images or lots of 8k video, I probably wouldn't be asking this question and just going with the fastest option. But 95% of the time, I feel like I am not dealing with enough images that 83ms of savings will add up to a noticeable difference. But LR could definitely be doing something under the cover that makes disk speed more important than my basic math....Show more →
