Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: jsingley on November 23, 2013, 11:15:09 am

Title: Optimizing LR5 catalog when using an SSD
Post by: jsingley on November 23, 2013, 11:15:09 am
It is my understanding that one should not defrag an SSD. If my LR5 catalog is on an SSD and I backup to a different drive, will optimization of the catalog upon exiting and backing up LR5 in any way harm or adversely affect the SSD (which contains all LR5 files except the images and the backups)?
Title: Re: Optimizing LR5 catalog when using an SSD
Post by: JRSmit on November 23, 2013, 12:03:06 pm
Do not see the relationship between defrag and catalog optimisation. I have my cat on an ssd and once in a while i optimise my catalog.
Title: Re:
Post by: Torbjörn Tapani on November 23, 2013, 12:22:32 pm
It will not harm your SSD in any way.
Title: Re: Optimizing LR5 catalog when using an SSD
Post by: Bart_van_der_Wolf on November 23, 2013, 04:30:38 pm
It is my understanding that one should not defrag an SSD.

SSDs operate differently from regular disks. No slowdown due to head-movements when reading fragmented consecutive data, but a slowdown due to wear-leveling algorithms that try to balance the limited number of writes to all memory locations evenly. So rewriting the data of a catalog will gradually slow down performance of the SSD. The gradual slow down can be 'fixed' by issuing a TRIM command (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(computing)) with appropriate tools (e.g. O&O software's Defrag Professional (http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag/index.html), or similar alternatives).

Quote
If my LR5 catalog is on an SSD and I backup to a different drive, will optimization of the catalog upon exiting and backing up LR5 in any way harm or adversely affect the SSD (which contains all LR5 files except the images and the backups)?

It will gradually slow down SSD performance, I do not know if it helps getting the data cleaned up in other ways that might benefit performance but I somewhat doubt it, on an SSD that is.

Cheers,
Bart