U.2 connector?

dancook · 24 Apr 2018 at 07:57

So I have two sata ssds in my pc. Operating system and games.

I need something for lightroom. Catalog and image imports for processing, not sure it should be the same drive but anything is better than using an external USB drive.

Should I get a u.2 drive for this?

Is it future proof? Or will the connection become obsolete

I may change motherboard before end of year, and I don't see u.2 mentioned on a x470 board I just looked at

dancook · 24 Apr 2018 at 09:02

Going to pass on the u.2 drive for now, I have one sata port available - but even then I might get away with my two drives for now, my catalog is only 30gb in size - I will have to keep importing to external USB for now though.

mrbazmondo · 24 Apr 2018 at 12:59

Is the external drive SSD or HDD? There shouln't be much of a problem with it speed wise using USB3. If there is you could try usb3.1gen2.
If you don't have an M.2 connector and have a spare long PCI.e port you could get a cheap adaptor. You'll be able to use if for storage but won't be able to boot off it.

dancook · 24 Apr 2018 at 13:18

mrbazmondo said:
Is the external drive SSD or HDD? There shouln't be much of a problem with it speed wise using USB3. If there is you could try usb3.1gen2.
If you don't have an M.2 connector and have a spare long PCI.e port you could get a cheap adaptor. You'll be able to use if for storage but won't be able to boot off it.

the USB external drive is HDD (WD 16TB), it takes a while to wake up the Lightroom is loaded, the catalog and photos are on the same drive - so you open a file and it creates preview on same drive. I deal with 2000-5000 images per event and it feels a bit slow sometimes..

Don't have any pci-e, ITX motherboard, so only GPU

mrbazmondo · 24 Apr 2018 at 13:50

As your project is only 30G I'd be inclined to move it to one of your internal SSD. Do you ave space to give that a try?

dancook · 24 Apr 2018 at 14:25

mrbazmondo said:
As your project is only 30G I'd be inclined to move it to one of your internal SSD. Do you ave space to give that a try?

yes that's what i meant before, but i see I didn't word it well - will try catalog on one of my SSD - will have to make imports of photos to the external usb drive still though

thanks