PC Upgrade Help - Need to improve my digital imaging work flow!

[Combat squirrel]

As title!!

I am a full time photographer/videographer and getting through TB's of editing but I am finding my PC sluggish (I use LR 6.1.1 and Prem Pro cc 2015), iv recently done a fresh format and its a little nippier but still sluggish ripping through image edits for example and of course rendering video takes ages, current specs:

I7 4690k 6 core @ 4.6ghz
32GB DDR3 1866mhz Ram
Nvidia 980Ti
Samsung 500gb SSD System Drive
Many 4TB HGST 7200rpm data drives

Now, I am trying to figure out if having my current work edits on a mechanical drive is the bottle neck here, obviously iv tweaked lightroom to render 1:1 on import etc

Would a huge SSD help? How would I manage work flow on a 'small' SSD drive (although enough to hold say 3-4 clients work at a time) and then move it either to my backup server or mechanical drive on my pc.

OR do I have to upgrade my processor? Which altho not current gen is fairly well specced, I have looked at 2 options:

(A) 8-12 core Intel Xeon ES processors - only reasonably priced multicore processors, however I would cut my GHZ in half - ending up with double the threads or more but also only ~2.3ghz on average

(B) Get whatever you guys think on finance - my own brief thoughts being:

8 core haswell i7 and overclock for ~4.2-4.4ghz 16 threads

10+ core xeon haswell but even more money

ANY ideas?

 

[Cyanide]

4 SSD's - 1 for OS & Software, 1 for the LR cache, 1 for media files and 1 for final output.

Then JBOD/RAID1/NAS etc to store everything on when it's done.

An X99 based system will be faster as the CC suite can make use of all the cores but you'll want to sort out your drive setup anyway so it may be worth seeing if you can sort that first and then if it's not enough upgrade the CPU.

 

[Combat squirrel]

Very interesting thank you - I have a recently spare 256gb SSD thanks to a netbook dying, ill use that for cache (makes sense)

I assume the media files is where 'current work' is stored? also makes sense,

However im curious as the advantage of a final output SSD? Just for exporting surely 140mb/s mechanical is ok ?

Could be wrong, thanks for your input

 

[Cyanide]

Very interesting thank you - I have a recently spare 256gb SSD thanks to a netbook dying, ill use that for cache (makes sense)

I assume the media files is where 'current work' is stored? also makes sense,

However im curious as the advantage of a final output SSD? Just for exporting surely 140mb/s mechanical is ok ?

Could be wrong, thanks for your input

Yes, current work gets its own SSD.

Mechanical drives will always be the slowest part of the system. If you're reading from an SSD, using an SSD as a cache and you've got a decent CPU running it makes sense to go SSD on the output drive too just to eliminate any chance of that being the issue.

Or you could just drop all your HDD's in RAID5

 

[Combat squirrel]

Cool ok will investigate ! I can drop a 2TB SSD in to test........the output hard drive ill keep to mechanical to see if this helps 1st, also I often leave stuff to render/export when im busy elsewhere away from PC so I think that will be less of an issue..........its more when im actually editing and actually working its sluggish

 

[Cyanide]

Cool ok will investigate ! I can drop a 2TB SSD in to test........the output hard drive ill keep to mechanical to see if this helps 1st, also I often leave stuff to render/export when im busy elsewhere away from PC so I think that will be less of an issue..........its more when im actually editing and actually working its sluggish

SSD for the cache/library should definitely help with that. Have you checked the GPU acceleration option as well? Try it both on and off - people have reported problems with it and it can run faster without acceleration in some cases.