Lightroom, hard drives and speed

Schizophonic · 29 Oct 2013 at 18:39

Just looking to explore my options and see what I can do with my current situation.

I'm running out of local HDD with all my photos that I've accumulated over the years. I do delete the duff ones but keep nearly 65% for a job. My current rig I've got an SSD as my OS and 2 x 1TB in RAID 0. All my photos, cached previews and etc is on my RAID.

I've got an HP NL40 microserver and was thinking to move everything onto that with my cached previews but wasn't sure how it would effect on speed? To me when going through my library, speed is of the essences and I don't want to spend more than enough time to do my jobs.

Options are:
1. Get 2 x 2TB and put them in RAID 0 on my rig
2. Move everything over onto my microserver and hope my network and the hardrive speed can do everything as quick?

Genoma · 29 Oct 2013 at 19:03

In my humble opinion you are dancing with fire with RAID 0 unless you have a rigorous daily backup to cover it.

My setup is Cache, library, previous and import on SSD. Long term library photos in date order on HDDD. Both backed up.

I really don't think you are going to benefit hugely from RAID 0 but I might be very wrong. In fact if I was in your position I would go for 2x largest drive I can get in RAID 1, combined with import+edit are+catalogue+cache on SSD.

Nexus · 29 Oct 2013 at 23:18

I used to run my Aperture library on a RAID 0, I had three backups systems for it, but obviously you still had to be vigilant about doing it pretty much every time you used the library.

I switched to a WD Black drive instead and haven't found much difference for photo editing. The RAID 0 has been brilliant for video editing though.

Raymond Lin · 29 Oct 2013 at 23:28

Thunderbolt running RAID 1 is my working drive.

Janesy B · 30 Oct 2013 at 09:55

LR installed on SSD, catalog and photos on a WD red. Speed is good. If you have gigabit everything it should be fine, otherwise forget it.

mrk · 30 Oct 2013 at 09:57

I import my RAWs via Lightroom which stores them on my documents HDD (WD Red) but the catalogue itself is stored on my OS drive which is an SSD. This I find provides good performance since 1:1 previews/standard previews etc are with the catalogue.

Columbo · 30 Oct 2013 at 12:38

I have 2x 256gb Samsung SSD in RAID0 which what Lightroom and my Catalogue is on.

I then have 4x 2tb drives in RAID5 (around 4tb usable) which is where the all the photos are stored and imported to.

I then have a 2x2tb Synology NAS which my OS gets backed upto every Sunday night from 12am - 8am, as Janesy stated though you really do need a gigabit network for that this type of setup otherwise it's just painful.

RAID 0 is fine as long as you understand and prepare for the potential loss. I don't have anything critical on my SSD's that I would care about losing and the performance gains when playing games is worth it to me personally, for others it may not be.