Speeding up workflow, SSD's and External drives

[renkockwell]

Ok i am trying to speed up my workflow as it is starting to get slow. I want to upgrade my macbook pro to a 256gb ssd and more ram. Currently i am using up about 300gbs which i don't mind shrinking everything to but my need for space is just gonna keep going higher and higher. I think it would just be stupid for me to fill up the internal drive especially a SSD with just pictures, i have an external drive but i use it as a backup while the pictures stay on my laptop.
1. I am wondering if lightroom4 or possibly another software (i guess i would switch if it meant much faster workflow) somehow allows for me to export everything to an external and while keeping thumbnails or jpegs of raw files on the SSD and while i do work take the file and put it in the ssd for quicker usage.
2. Or i am wondering if there is something that lets me throw all the files on the main internal drive, work on them and at the end of the day or even week archive them on the external, i would still like to be able to work on the external files as well.

I would buy another large external drive for backup or use my current internal for another backup so the pictures are never in one place at any time.

any suggestions? how do u get around this. Upgrading my laptop at the moment is out of the question, i have a budget of about $350 which allows for a SSD upgrade and Internal ram, and possibly another external drive.

 

[The_Traveler]

I don't understand what you mean that your 'workflow is getting slow'.

Are there long pauses while your laptop churns away?
When is that?
what is it doing at that time?
what software is running?

 

[sovietdoc]

I think if you tell LR to save 1:1 previews of your files, you can work with those locally, and then when you need to export from catalog it will apply those to RAW's.

I know for a fact that Bridge (come with Photoshop) can store your working cache on one drive while the actual files are on another drive.


Your workflow is slow? Oh, you're on a mac. That's probably why.

 

[renkockwell]

I don't understand what you mean that your 'workflow is getting slow'.

Are there long pauses while your laptop churns away?
no long pauses really but i hope to speed everything up with SSD's and more ram. The problem is SSD's are expensive for space so i want to have the storage on another hard drive while working, but if this slows thigs down then it is essentially a useless idea.
When is that?
only if i try to stich together a massive pano or crazy hdr image.
what is it doing at that time?
barely ever rainbow wheel just processing.
what software is running?
when i run light room its just lighroom, or perhaps photoshop in the back and such nothing more.

 

[table1349]

Unless you can put a SSD and a HD in your MBP or you MBP is equipped with a thunderbolt port and you have a thunderbolt external HD then the SSD is probably not really going to help a lot. With photoshop you do not want your scratch disk on the SSD. For an SSD to work to its fullest you want only your OS and programs on the SSD. Data storage needs to be on a separate drive. If you max out your ram it would help to speed up your system. I upped my MPB to a max of 8 gigs and it runs CS6 and Lightroom with no issues at all.

 

[davisphotos]

I have a 60GB SSD in my MBPro, and I use a 320GB Firewire 800 drive. With 8GB of RAM, it's pretty speedy for a 3 year old laptop. The Mac Pro with an SSD and 20GB of RAM is a bit faster, but not as much faster as I would expect.

 

[The_Traveler]

I agree with the others.
This is a ram and processor problem, not amenable to fix with an ssd.

 

[renkockwell]

I agree with the others.
This is a ram and processor problem, not amenable to fix with an ssd.

i will eventually build a hackintosh but for now all i can afford is the SSD and 8gb ram for about $300. The processor is a 2.7ghz i7 dual core so i don't think its that slow, i dont have a thunderbolt port so i would be using fire wire for storage.

 

[EDL]

I don't have a MAC, but I do have a 256GB SSD in my PC and not only are read/writes incredibly fast, but the whole PC is faster because....the swap file is so much faster. Depending on how the MAC makes use of its RAM (because even with 8+ GB of memory in the PC, programs don't just automatically use it all) it may or may not help.

If you have an i7 dual core then you are already processing pretty fast (assuming your processing software makes use of multi threads). The only way to go up is to increase clock speed or get more cores. Of course a quad or 6 core i7 will probably use a different chipset as well, which can also increase processing speed.

Use the SSD to import your photos, process locally and then save them off to your long term storage. Most of the newer terabyte, external storage solutions are network addressable too, so you could set up a 2-3 terabyte NAS on your home network so you wouldn't have to keep plugging it into your MAC to move your finished photos to it.

In the long term, I'd consider a third solution for saving your finished work to, such as DVD or blu-ray disk. Hard drives are mechanical devices and they do break after a while (and SSD's do wear out). If you have thousands of photos, saved to a hard drive over a long period of time, how devastating would it be if the drive crashes one day and you lose them all? A burned DVD or blu-ray disk will far outlast a mechanical hard drive (and burnable disks and drives are cheap).

If ultimate disk speed is your goal, there are even PCI slot based SSD solutions now that are hitting 1.5GB/s read and 1.2GB/s write speeds, but they aren't cheap. $3200 for the 960GB version down to about $600 for a 240GB version (OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480 GB PCIe SSD Review - HDTune Pro Benchmarks - The SSD Review).

 

[table1349]

If you are using CD/DVD/Blu Ray as a sole backup or long term backup you are fooling yourself into believing it will work. First there is no reliable way to determine useable life of optical media contrary to what manufactures will tell you. Secondly if your handling and storage procedures are not up to the standard required your media can be damaged or easily degrade quickly. Third, I doubt that there are very many people out there using optical media storage that will take the time to daily take a copy of their new items to an off storage site for safe keeping. If it is on site it is susceptible to any form of disaster that could occur. Optical media is a delicate storage device that requires some proper care and understanding to try and get decent life out of your media.

Me, I have three redundant drives in my NAS storing all my data. One fails I have two backup's. Plus I use off site storage that automatically backs up at 3:00 a.m. daily. I can also do a manual backup any time I wish. The best long term storage solution is off site redundant backups by a well established data storage company.

 

[EDL]

I disagree about CD/DVD/Blu-ray. A burned disk, in a sleeve or disk case will last years upon years. I have some original CD's burned from back when CD burners became available that have been treated roughly, left out of cases on desk tops, tossed around, thrown in boxes, literally forgotten for years and they still read perfectly fine. I'll toss early RW disks into that mix as well. The very first RW disk I ever used (and still have) is still readable to this day, even after it had been through a number of erasures and writes.

My main point is that a mechanical hard drive should not be your final, long term storage solution, mirrored or not. A power surge can, and will fry the entire RAID array.

Offsite storage is a good idea, but depending on space requirements might be more costly than one may want to spend. Then there is the question of what happens to your data if that company decides to close business? Not something happening a lot, but something to consider.

If you are a professional that relies on photography is your income, then certainly you need the best long term storage you can get, but for a hobbiest, I still argue that burned disks are perfectly acceptable.

 

[table1349]

I have hard drives that I have been using for years as well. Only 1 hard drive failure in 20 + years and it was backed up by another drive. I have had more CD's/DVD's fail than I have hard drives. I just don't use them for critical storage. Optical media is just as susceptible to failure as is any other media. Redundancy is the key. For those that want to use optical media for archive purposes this is a good read:

http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/CDandDVDCareandHandlingGuide.pdf

As for off side storage, a well established company is paramount. As for cost, how much is your data worth to you if you lost it?

 

[renkockwell]

I have hard drives that I have been using for years as well. Only 1 hard drive failure in 20 + years and it was backed up by another drive. I have had more CD's/DVD's fail than I have hard drives. I just don't use them for critical storage. Optical media is just as susceptible to failure as is any other media. Redundancy is the key. For those that want to use optical media for archive purposes this is a good read:

http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/CDandDVDCareandHandlingGuide.pdf

As for off side storage, a well established company is paramount. As for cost, how much is your data worth to you if you lost it?

backup is not a problem, my plan was to use the ssd for current import and use an external possibly networked for transfer and storage, and finally another backup external that only has pictures on the drive. Hard drives do die but it is pretty easy to retrieve stuff off of crashed hard drives then it is off of CD's and DVD's and from the look of it it doesn't seem like optical media will last much longer.

My pictures are already in at least 2 places at one time and will be in 2 places later as well.

 

[table1349]

Well if you want to max your speed, then Max your ram and if you get an SSD use it clean as the scratch disk, not for your OS or programs. If you are talking Photoshop here is a good article that will help you optimize your system.
Optimize performance | Photoshop CS4, CS5, CS6

 

[Garbz]

I've upgraded to an SSD recently and Lightroom is FAST .... at opening. That's about it. No real difference in use.

Lightroom is getting very bloated but then it is also doing a lot these days. I found in the past the major problem was not RAM either (Lightroom rarely uses above 1GB even on my 16GB machine), but rather the bottleneck is processing speed. The processor is the weak part when editing photos in Lightroom.

RAM comes in handy in photoshop. When you start stacking many 16bit layers on each other, or stitching 100mpxl panoramas together then the RAM starts playing an important role, but for the most part ... it's a processor issue.