Location of Lightroom catalogue and pictures

[DoubleCheese]

I've just read a few interesting articles on Lightroom and the pros of having the catalogue and all the pictures on an external hard drive and wanted to see if anyone here had done the same.

The rationale is that you can take your entire photo catalogue with you and you can work on the photo's from a laptop (if you were not at home/office) and a desktop (not simultaneously obviously).
As always there is another drive, external or internal to wich backups are made each day so you have a mirror image of everything on the first disc incase it fails. I really like the idea of this and can see how I could use it more and more.

I just wonder if there is a substantial slow down in writing to the external drive via eSATA doubt it though.

 

[rpstewart]

I can see there's a certain rationale behind that but the I/O contention would do my head in. I've separated the catalogue/previews from the photos so that the photos are read from one drive while the catalogue etc are read from another. Doing it that way means imports/preview builds etc are far faster than on a single drive.

 

[Mr Jones]

I personally have an 2nd HDD in my laptop just for my photos/catalogue. Similar idea but mine was more from the point of backup. I experience no slow down and I suspect via a eSATA connection, you'll only be limited by the HDD RPM (most portable external HDD are 5400 if not slower)

 

[FreeStream]

My setup is

300Gb Veloci with the catalog + previews
1Tb for raw data.

Works nicely, esp with 6Gb and 64bit working