Best Practices for external hard drives with Capture One

[snations]

Does anyone know where I can find information on using external SSD drives with C1 in a session work flow or a catalog work flow? I am primarily working with sessions.

My experience has been that edits are not retained consistently when the session resides on an external drive. I suspect that it is due to latency in hard drive writes but I cannot be sure. I have looked on the Capture One support page, submitted a ticket to support, and browsed a number of on-line forums. No one seems to offer an answer.

The best information I could find was from Paul Steunebrink, who suggested in a brief forum post that internal drives should be used "...until the job is done..."

[UnfamiliarLight]

I have had no such problems with external drives. When I first started using C1 my photos were on an external drive connected by USB3. I moved the drive internally a while back and it works just as well. This is with sessions and a catalogue.

I have heard of people with issues using NAS but not with directly attached drives.

[tcphoto1]

This is the first I've heard of an issue. I will do a shoot, copy to two external drives and delete from the main drives once it's copied. When I revisit a session, I simply relaunch and copy the session to the other drive without a problem.

[snations]

This is the first I've heard of an issue. I will do a shoot, copy to two external drives and delete from the main drives once it's copied. When I revisit a session, I simply relaunch and copy the session to the other drive without a problem.

I have had no such problems with external drives. When I first started using C1 my photos were on an external drive connected by USB3. I moved the drive internally a while back and it works just as well. This is with sessions and a catalogue.

I have heard of people with issues using NAS but not with directly attached drives.

So the question I have for each of you: what computer platform PC or Mac?  I'm on  a PC.

[UnfamiliarLight]

So the question I have for each of you: what computer platform PC or Mac?  I'm on  a PC.

PC using Win 10. I started with C1 v11 now using v20

[snations]

This issue occurs for me only when the target raw files reside on an external drive and I edit them.  If I move them to an internal drive the performance of C! is as expected.

[tcphoto1]

So the question I have for each of you: what computer platform PC or Mac?  I'm on  a PC.

Mac

[saxbike]

I have been using C1 on an older Macbook Pro (late 2014).  My catalogs and library reside on an external NAS that is set up as RAID with two 4tb drives.  I can access my catalogs/library both directly wired or through my WiFi.  The wired access is, of course, much faster, but I have had no issues with maintaining my edits in C1.  My organization is based on yearly catalogs and I only keep the last two or three years on the internal hard drive of MacBook, but all older catalogs reside on the NAS drives.  All images are in the library on the NAS. My device is a Synology DS218+.

[budjames]

I use an iMacPro as my principal photo editing workstation. I use separate C1Pro catalogs for each year because I found that after catalogs have about 15k images, C1Pro slowed down. I use a referenced folder structure. My C1Pro catalogs are kept on my internal SSD. My referenced folder structure was kept on an OWC ThunderBay4 RAID drive connected via Thunderbolt 2. This set up worked great for a few years. The read/write speed of the ThunderBay4 drive averaged 500 to 600 MB/S.

I have 8-bay Synology DiskStation NASs installed on a 10gb ethernet network. I created a partition on a Synology to hold my referenced folder structure which contains about 6TB of images. This set uses Synology's RAID system with redundancy. The read/write speed averages 500-700 MB/S. This setup eliminated the OWC ThunderBay4 from my workflow and added 1 drive failure safety. All images are backed up real time to a second Synology on my network and then to a third Synology located at my office about 10 miles away for off-site back ups.

They Synology-based set up worked great, but occasionally I would have to "locate" my image folder after opening a C1Pro catalog because C1Pro could not find the folder on my network. This never create a problem, but it was an inconvenience.

Finally, I bit the bullet and purchased an OWC ThunderBlade 8TB SSD RAID and connected it to my iMacPro via Thunderbolt 3. The read/write speed of the ThunderBlade exceeds 2,100 MB/S! It screams.

Using the Synology "Drive" utility installed on my iMacPro, the ThunderBlade drive is real time backed up to my Synology. This is the best set up that I have had and C1Pro fiies even when using my larger c1Pro catalogs.

My suggestion is that you get the fastest direct attached storage you can afford to hold your referenced folder photos. The referenced folder structure makes back ups easy and these images can be accessed with any other application that you what to use in the future. I would stay away from using C1Pro catalog to store your originals. Just make sure that you back up your images and C1Pro catalogs frequently. I have my C1Pro catalog back up preferences set to every time when I quit a session. My iMacPro internal SSD is also backed up using TimeMachine.

C1Pro Sessions are a cool feature, however, I don't use them. I might use them if I traveled with a laptop with C1Pro installed, but I travel  light. I only bring my iPad Pro with me as I have no need to do image editing while on vacation.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Bud James

Please check out my fine art and travel photography at www.budjames.photography or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/budjamesphoto.