I have 64GB RAM in the main image processor, but have used up to 256GB previously for other purposes that need more. I have only have 40TB internal SSDs (for WIP) and maybe another 60-70 TB of extra SSDs and roughly 100 HDDs in different places. The pricks are so expensive now. I was going to throw away a bunch of stuff like 2TB SSDs or 8TB HDDs but am not sure what to do about it now. Wish I had gone with 2x30.72TB U.2 SSDs a few years ago when I THOUGHT they were expensive.
I have numerous computers for different purposes (only 5 have imaging software, 2 of those have good GPUs) so workloads are dispersed. Locally I have multiple NAS connected to 4+ computers, but only 10gB SFP+ for now. Even with a decent array of 8 drives ZFS RAID-Z2 the speeds are slow compared to the SSDs so I like to work off of SSDs (work in progress) and just make sure they are replicated and snapshotted.
I have a M1 Max Macbook Pro with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD. I don't put any of my files on my internal SSD. I work off a 10 GbE connection to a NAS (about 12 TB that I backup locally as well to 2 remote locations.)
I had a new computer built late last summer. I went with 1TB SSD and 64 GB Ram on Windows 11. I use external storage and only keep a small amount of photos on the computer. I have 772 GB of free space.
16” M3 Max 1TB/64GB. I will never again skimp on internal memory. 1TB is not ideal. I’ve only once hit the wall with the 64GB ram. Like everyone else, I use very fast external SSD for image storage and a NAS, which has a Thunderbolt 4 connection to store video. Lots more to the system, but that’s the basics.
I have an eclectic mix of front-line computers. First is a pair of Linux boxes with 128GB RAM each and Intel SSD (PCIe internal card). Second is a Windows PC with 40GB RAM and some M.2 SSD. Third is a Mac Pro trashcan with 32GB RAM and 256GB internal SSD.
M5 Max MBP 64GB ram and 2 TB SSD. Only current shoots on the MBP which I use in clamshell mode attached to a Studio Display to do editing. Afterwards all are relocated to the NAS and also copied to a DAS.
@EB-1, , you have enough computers, drives, and RAM for all of Silicon Valley!
For those that are using a fast external drive, do you dump the photos onto your main machine, do the work, and then transfer/store them to the external drive? Or is the drive fast enough that you do the work directly from that external drive (like it was an internal drive)?
Xysterz wrote:
@EB-1@, , you have enough computers, drives, and RAM for all of Silicon Valley!
For those that are using a fast external drive, do you dump the photos onto your main machine, do the work, and then transfer/store them to the external drive? Or is the drive fast enough that you do the work directly from that external drive (like it was an internal drive)?
The external drive is fast enough.
It can take a little longer to do a full save or open a file, but that’s a minimal issue. The actual editing isn’t affected in any noticeable way.
Xysterz wrote:
@EB-1@, , you have enough computers, drives, and RAM for all of Silicon Valley!
For those that are using a fast external drive, do you dump the photos onto your main machine, do the work, and then transfer/store them to the external drive? Or is the drive fast enough that you do the work directly from that external drive (like it was an internal drive)?
Ideally you have enough space on your fastest drive(s) to work from. The slower larger drive(s)/arrays are more for the bulk storage. I believe in having a "work in progress" space on the fast SSDs and then copying/moving that dataset to the slower media when that work is done. That's not just for photos, but any large datasets.
Internal vs external is mostly about the bandwidth and latency of the data transfer. Individual 7200RPM hard drives are just slow on access time (slower than HDDs 20+ years ago) so only a little slower externally due to the SATA bridge. I can't stand them.
SSDs can be fast enough on TB. Most external SSDs have the limitation of single drive capacity and the pre-built ones may user cheaper components. But SSDs are so expensive now, that an 8TB PCIe 4.x M.2 SSD that was $550 in 2024 is now 4x or more.
Ultimately you have to test for yourself and make sure you have a 3-2-1 storage strategy. We see clueless users with crashed WD or Seagate single drives expecting data to be easily recovered. It's sad.
If you keep your machines up 24/7 then everything caches in memory. SSD is slow as molasses versus RAM. I'll even use ramdisk to unload a card, and then perform bulk deletions of the junk. No need to tax the durability of your SSD storage.
Xysterz wrote:
@EB-1@@, , you have enough computers, drives, and RAM for all of Silicon Valley!
For those that are using a fast external drive, do you dump the photos onto your main machine, do the work, and then transfer/store them to the external drive? Or is the drive fast enough that you do the work directly from that external drive (like it was an internal drive)?
It doesn’t really make a difference if the external SSD is on a fast enough connection. For Lightroom work I found even 10Gbs (~1GB/s) was fast enough. I currently use a few NVMe drives in external TB4 enclosures and those saturate the available TB bandwidth. The internal SSD in my Macs are technically faster but I have not realized any benefits from using those over externals. I prefer externals simply for being able to use them across systems and that they’re physically independent of any one system. All Macs are now SOC and if one component dies, it takes the entire system with it, including all images. Of course, backups are assumed to be maintained.
Xysterz wrote:
@EB-1@, , you have enough computers, drives, and RAM for all of Silicon Valley!
For those that are using a fast external drive, do you dump the photos onto your main machine, do the work, and then transfer/store them to the external drive? Or is the drive fast enough that you do the work directly from that external drive (like it was an internal drive)?
Since I do mainly landscape photography, I generally am processing a smaller amount of photos. Culling through what I've shot, finding those that are the best RAWs to work from. As Dan mentioned above, for the most part, the editing is done in memory, so it just depends on how tolerant you are in performance opening and then finally saving the result. My 10 GbE connection can be saturated on opening a file, but when saving my NAS is the bottleneck. I do have some SSD cache there to boost write performance though. And I don't find it to be unbearably slow.
I have a Thunderbolt NVME SSD that I used a bit, and it is very fast, but at the end of the day I just reverted to editing over my ethernet connection.
If I was shooting high volume, editing/processing high volumes of photos, then I could see maybe a shift to faster devices. But it really comes up to your own personal preferences based on your shooting and processing preferences.
So my working area is RAID 6 (with snapshots) along with a hot spare, the local backup is to a single drive, and the remote backup is to a single drive at my parents and then another backup to a cloud backup vendor. My rule of thumb is to never update the RAW files once ingested onto my NAS, and within a day there are 4 copies of it.
But again, my "works well" could easily be considered "crazy" by someone else.
If you check the application's website they provide minimum RAM and drive storage needs. Usually it is 16GB but adding more will improve performance. When buying a new computer I check what it ships with and avoid having to throw out a memory module to do an upgrade, i.e. avoid having two slots both already occupied. Also third party memory is much less expensive than Apple supplier memory with their computers.
I built a PC a little over a year ago with 10TB of SSD storage across three internal drives (one 4TB SSD is for photos alone, one for all other documents (and a LR scratch disk), and a 2TB drive for the OS and all applications) and 96GB of RAM that I was planning to upgrade to 192GB this year (but we all know why that's not going to happen any time soon). Around the same time I built out a NAS with 40TB of drive space.
At the time I was a bit miffed that I missed the rock-bottom storage prices of 2023 but now I'm thankful I got everything relatively cheap compared to today's disaster of a market
