Hybrid disc drives for Lightroom? Best of both worlds?

DoubleCheese · 20 Jul 2015 at 09:21

I need to upgrade my main Lightroom and backup drives as I'm running out of space. I'm after a fast drive for the Lr Catalogue and Hybrid drives look interesting. Any idea whether Lightroom takes advantage of the SSD on the drive and would this make it significantly faster than a WD Black drive?
The drive in mind is the 2TB Seagate Hybrid with 8GB SSD.

Thans!

mid_gen · 20 Jul 2015 at 09:53

Well, depends how big your catalog is.

I run a Seagate Momentus XT 1TB in my laptop, which is a 8GB SSD. You can't directly control what is cached to the SSD portion, so it will end up with a lot of that used by Windows files, commonly used applications etc. If you're using Lightroom a lot it's likely that it will end up on the SSD cache so you'll see the advantages of SSD there.

TBH though Lightroom usage day to day is much more dependent on the performance of the drives containing your thumbnails and image files, than a few operations on the catalog.

Hodders · 20 Jul 2015 at 10:20

I run the catalog from a local SSD drive and all the images are kept on a NAS device (Gb ethernet) that is raid5, with local rotated USB backup and a twice weekly amazon glaciar backup.

Works well.

mid_gen · 20 Jul 2015 at 10:33

Hodders said:
I run the catalog from a local SSD drive and all the images are kept on a NAS device (Gb ethernet) that is raid5, with local rotated USB backup and a twice weekly amazon glaciar backup.

Works well.

Exact same setup here. Catalog on local SSD, images on NAS, NAS syncing to Glacier and USB backup daily.

Vertigo · 20 Jul 2015 at 10:48

From what I understand, LR is generally far more CPU limited than disk speed.

DoubleCheese · 20 Jul 2015 at 11:07

Interesting setups...My set up is: Win7 PC, 120GB SSD primary drive for OS and programs. 1TB LR disc for both Catalogue and Images, another 1TB disc which one LR backup, Synology NAS which has another LR backup of the Lr disc.

mid_gen: I assume you back up the catalogue as well as the Lr images? Does Amazon Glacier maintain the same LR folder structure?
Are the advantages of splitting the Catalogue and Images onto separate discs significantly better than having both on one large fast disc?

mid_gen · 20 Jul 2015 at 13:05

I backup the catalog as well....but really I'm mostly concerned about the image files themselves.

No reason for splitting the catalog and images other than I use my NAS for all mass-storage, and I'd rather have the catalog on the local SSD (I don't think Lightroom plays nice with network located catalogs)

ajf · 23 Jul 2015 at 16:49

I've used a couple of different hybrid drives and to be honest never really felt any benefit, even running just Windows.
Better off doing what others mention and just get a dedicated SSD for the catalogs. Would probably even manage with a smaller 128Gb or 64Gb if just for that.

I currently have a primary SSD with Windows and Lightroom installed, then a second SSD with the catalogs, which I also use for loading the current batch of photos to. Not sure that makes any improvement, but I can, so i do!
Certainly doesn't seem SLOWER than having the images on a different disk to the catalogs.

Once done I move them off to a 1Tb 7200 drive.

Backup to USB drives and the best get converted anyway to hi-res jpeg and put on Flickr or Onedrive for easy viewing.

Bit 'old school' really but just haven't found the justification to get a NAS or full cloud backup.