Small SSD and Lightroom 4 -- Best Disk Config?

[mschubb]

I have limited room on my SSD boot drive and am trying to figure out the best configuration for LR4.  The program is installed on C.  Assuming I use one of my two other internal drives for storing images, where's the best place to keep my catalog?

The LR default location on the boot drive?  On the same drive as the images?  The other drive (which also serves as a scratch and page file for editing video)?

Any other configuration suggestions?

Thanks for any advice!

[Rhossydd]

No easy answer to this from the information you provide.
The difficulty is that filling up a SSD isn't regarded as good practice, so you need to keep a part of the SSD drive free (about 20%). So dependant on free space and catalogue size, putting it on the SSD may be counter productive.
In an ideal world another small SSD just for the LR catalogue/previews and ACR cache would be the best option.

[tived]

Not sure what platform you are on, but in the ideal situation, if you are able to get a very large SSD or several smaller SSD's and stripe them together in a RAID-0 array, for you catalog and temp space. have some large HDD's for your image storage in say, RAID-1 or RAID-10 (Stripe and mirror) to improve read/write speed and mirror for some redundancy.

This may mean that you have to get yourself a RAID controller, HBA controllers are cheaper and slower but sufficien tof RAID 0 and 1

let us know if this is of any help

Henrik

I have limited room on my SSD boot drive and am trying to figure out the best configuration for LR4.  The program is installed on C.  Assuming I use one of my two other internal drives for storing images, where's the best place to keep my catalog?

The LR default location on the boot drive?  On the same drive as the images?  The other drive (which also serves as a scratch and page file for editing video)?

Any other configuration suggestions?

Thanks for any advice!

[John Caldwell]

Since I'm oriented to external (portable) drives, I always keep image files on external drives, and catalog files with the images on those external drives. My catalog is therefore entirely portable, and I could open my catalog(s) at your house, on your system, and it would like much as it looks at my house. We use Mac machines, and find OWC FW800 drives a good value. I buy the 1TB "pocket" drives which are buss-powered to carry in my laptop bag. For our main in-office system, we use the OWC Mercury Elite enclosures in larger sizes. On the boot drives on my system are SSD.

Using SSD, RAID or otherwise, for image storage is something I'd find unusable. But it depends very much on how much data we're talking about. Some very disciplined shooters, who log a few dozen images a week, might find it more than practical.

John Caldwell

[mschubb]

Thanks for all your responses.  

More info:  I currently have 25% free space on a 119gb SSD boot drive.  (Win7 Pro, MS Office, Lightroom 4, and Production Premium CS6 filled it up.)  My currently installed disks are the 120gb SSD plus two 7200rpm 1TB Spinpoints.  I can't put them in a raid as I need three different disks for video editing.  (1-Program; 2-Scratch/pagefile; 3-Media.)   A RAID array is in my future, but not for now.

Being new to Lightroom, I have no idea of how big a catalog file will/can be.  

Photography is a small part of my work: a few times a year there might be a job with 3000+ raw images to handle, but mostly it's occasional personal shooting.    My current (active) images/media files fit on a 1TB drive, which makes for an easy back-up to a 1TB portable drive.  (Older work gets archived on back-up disks.)

So my new questions:

   > How big do catalog files get for moderate users?  

   > Is there much speed/efficency downside to having a catalog file stored on the same disk with images? 

        (John - Your external drive approach seems like a good way to work for someone project oriented.) 

   > Is the speed of the catalog disk a big factor?  

   > Where does the "temp space" live?   Previews, ACR cache?   Are these locations I should be setting?

Thanks again for your advice.

[Sheldon N]

I keep my LR Catalog(s), the ACR Cache, and Photoshop scratch disk on a second SSD, with the OS/Programs on a primary SSD. The SSD is 128GB and only about 1/3 full. I have 16GB of RAM and the scratch disk does not see much activity.

Your LR catalog will grow as you add previews to it. I have my settings configured to delete 1:1 previews after 30 days. The previews live inside the LR Catalof folders. My catalogs currently total around 30GB for 37,000 images across 4 catalogs. The ACR Cache location is user configurable in terms of both size and location. I have mine set to a maximum size of 40GB.

Using an SSD for LR catalogs will speed up things that require reading from the database file and loading previews. You will mainly see it as "snappier" performance when browsing through the grid view and moving from image to image in Loupe view. It won't affect preview rendering/image export times or the develop tab functions in any significant way.

A Samsung 830 128GB SSD can be had for under $100 right now, so I'd just recommend adding the second drive.

[francois]

I'm also keeping the ACR cache and Lightroom catalog on a separate SSD… Ian lyons wrote an article last year about Lightroom and SSD (here). His findings must still be valid.

[JRSmit]

Currently finalising implementation of my new workstation, using ivy bridge chipset, windows 7  64bit. I use Samsung 830 256gb for my system disk and identical one for my catalog and acr cache. I did some brief tests comparing with conventional HDD by making a clone of my system disk, also holding a lightroom catalog with some images. I experienced far greater performance differences than Ian did. will repeat the test some time this month but then timed. Seems like the current Ivy Bridge chipset and CPU is less limiting in the performance.
Note, i use a WD caviar black 2TB for storing my image files once all processing in LR is done for given assignment. During processing the images of an assignment, these files are on a separate partition of the systemdisk.
Ian used OWC, i selected the Samsung because of their very good write performance, especially sequential incompressible write performance. typically not a strength of the Sandforce based SSD's.  The read performance on most ssd's is quite good, so that is not an important factor.

[Rendezvous]

Some information here that might be useful for quite a few people here:

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/blog/will-an-ssd-improve-adobe-lightroom-performance/

There are time comparisons with having data/catlogues/cache on SSD vs normal hard drives.