p.2 #1 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
DWOfPaul wrote:
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.
I can't vouch for this article but it might be helpful for you. FWIW, I use USB a 4 drive on a TB5 machine and it's fast enough for nearly everything I throw at it:
p.2 #2 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
Tech geek here, who also shoots medium format.
TLDR: they are all more than fast enough. Save your money.
Going deeper:
For large file transfers/imports, faster is technically better... but does it matter if you can transfer 100gb of images in 17 seconds vs 2 minutes? The fastest memory cards are around 3700mb/s iirc, and many are much slower (hundreds of MB/s range). So it's quite likely your memory cards is the bottle neck for imports anyways. Personally I'm not bothered by spending an extra minute or two here.
For editing, 1000mb/s is fine. You can still load a 300mb 150 megapixel Phase One IQ4 file in 0,3 seconds. Do you need faster than that? Latency is what matters more for opening and quickly scanning your library (loading cache files). NVMe is best here, but even sata SSD is fine for images. Once the image is open, it will cache in ram.
I would honestly not worry about the super high speed stuff. If you don't know if you actually need it, then you probably don't need it. Truly, and I am someone who is setting up 10G fibre networking at my house, and may even upgrade to 25G SFP28. But this is only for large multi terabyte video transfers over the network. For photo editing a 1000mb/s is more than fine, it's fast.
p.2 #3 · How much does external SSD speed matter for photo editing?
For editing an image file, computer speed is often insignificant compared with how slowly we operate, but not always.
For applying edits to many image files simultaneously it matters more.
Even if you're not actually editing but looking for images with certain characteristics, searches are satisfyingly quicker with faster SSDs on faster data connections.
The same applies when creating or testing file checksums to ensure the files are still intact.
I'm not a pro photographer so my interest at any time is likely to extend well beyond a single shooting session. I expect pros spend a lot of time on the photos from their most recent shoot, so there'll be be less flitting about through years of photos that are stored all over their storage media rather than close together.
Even a SATA SSD overcomes a lot of HDD-related delays, so much of the potential SSD advantage is already achieved. NVMe SSDs of any speed are another big step up. Beyond that the returns are diminishing.
