LightRoom Catalogue on SSD worth it?

[neil snape]

LR4 is getting slower and slower. With >100K images, many CR2, and or PSD, the catalogue is really slowing to a crawl.

I've separated old images ( around 1.5Tb ) onto a second volume.
The main current image disc is a 3Tb 5900rpm WD.

Scratch disc for PS and LR is an old 250GB 7200 rpm.

This is on an old MacPro 2007 9GB ram OS 10.7. Everything runs fine, except as of late when LR and PS are open sometimes the whole system starts slowing like the finder, Safari page draws etc. If I quit PS it comes back again. Lots of swap file space as the OS disc is 1/2 full leaving 800 GB free.

I could care less about how fast apps open so I'm not keen on redoing volumes to separate OS and documents etc onto SSD.

I do care about the way the catalogue is slowing. It sometimes takes a while before the previews populate the LR Library grid window.



Would simply putting the LR catalogue on an SSD with or without the scratch from PS on say a 128GB SSD make a difference?

[francois]

LR4 is getting slower and slower. With >100K images, many CR2, and or PSD, the catalogue is really slowing to a crawl.

I've separated old images ( around 1.5Tb ) onto a second volume.
The main current image disc is a 3Tb 5900rpm WD.

Scratch disc for PS and LR is an old 250GB 7200 rpm.

This is on an old MacPro 2007 9GB ram OS 10.7. Everything runs fine, except as of late when LR and PS are open sometimes the whole system starts slowing like the finder, Safari page draws etc. If I quit PS it comes back again. Lots of swap file space as the OS disc is 1/2 full leaving 800 GB free.

I could care less about how fast apps open so I'm not keen on redoing volumes to separate OS and documents etc onto SSD.

I do care about the way the catalogue is slowing. It sometimes takes a while before the previews populate the LR Library grid window.



Would simply putting the LR catalogue on an SSD with or without the scratch from PS on say a 128GB SSD make a difference?

Neil,
You should read Ian Lyons' article Will an SSD Improve Adobe Lightroom Performance?. It's interesting.

FWIW, I find that since I stored my LR catalog, fluidity has increased but it's not like day and night…

[neil snape]

Good read thanks. Seems that if the SSD is cache and catalogue, the improvements would be image scrolling, fetching metadata etc, but hardly at all loading previews into grid or dev modules.

Looks like the only thing to do is buy a new computer with much faster I/O processors etc. A bit too bad as LR3 was running perfectly on the same hardware.

I just tried a new catalogue and imported a folder.  Scrolling, and dev settings are much faster than in the main >100K image catalogue.

[stever]

I tried an SSD and indeed, faster processor appears to be the only way to significantly improve performance.  I have 16gb of memory but i'm not sure more than 8gb makes a difference.  be sure your LR cache is large enough, the default is not enough

[neil snape]

The cache I had set to 100GB on the separate disc for scratch and CR dat files. The start up mechanical drive holds the preview cache 25Gb, and lrcat 4.3 GB.

[Hans Kruse]

Neil,
You should read Ian Lyons' article Will an SSD Improve Adobe Lightroom Performance?. It's interesting.

FWIW, I find that since I stored my LR catalog, fluidity has increased but it's not like day and night…

I have similar experience from having the LR catalog on a SSD. When I upgraded my MacBook Pro in 2012 I replaced the internal drive and the DVD drive with two 512GB SSD drives. Although it does not speed up Lightroom much it makes the use of the machine entirely different in that it is silent and no moving parts and battery life is better too. This is now my only machine.

[JRSmit]

Neil, i have the catalog with its previews, and the ACR cache for the images as shown in the develop module on a ssd, a samsung 830, and find it does improve performance.
today i would choose for a samsung 840 pro, most ssd have good read speed, only a few have good write speeds for large files. Samsung 840pro is one of them. ( samsung830 is no longer produced).
So my system config is: a 128gb ssd as systemdrive, holds nothing else; a 256gb ssd for my catalog and acr cache; my online image files are stored on  2 hdd's 2tb wd caviar black. When i import a shoot to develop it, i put these images on another 256gb ssd, and when done editing i move the folder with the images to the hdd.
I use mobo with z77 chipset and intel core i7 processor, with 16 gb memory. Little problems with speed in library module, only when having a lot of spothealing on portraits of adolescents fot instance.
N.B.: i have 1:1 previews, and when done editing recreate the 1:1 previews, does make a difference in library module speed.

[Phil Indeblanc]

1:1 previews, wow....yes that would make a diffrence...One way of looking at it, if you happen to delete or lose a file, you have some kinda of static "backup". :-)

[dreed]

The question of "how fast is my PC" and "what do I need to do to make it faster for LR" comes up often.

I've posted some information in the "computer forum" in this thread that will hopefully help:


http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=77096.0

[JRSmit]

1:1 previews, wow....yes that would make a diffrence...One way of looking at it, if you happen to delete or lose a file, you have some kinda of static "backup". :-)

it is my experience that  with 1:1 previews the switch to develop modus seems faster, also when in library modus and zooming in it is faster. Also it will show if the raw file is corrputed when you import it, as LR has to read the entire file. On the minus side: the preview cache needs more diskspace.