Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: tonysiciliano1 on February 09, 2019, 01:51:05 am
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I currently use a Mac Pro 2013 (32 Ram, 3.5 GHz 6 core) which has Thunderbolt 2. I store my 6TB of photos on external 7600 rpm hard drives in an Thunderbolt 1 enclosure with a max speed 10 Gpbs. I shoot 32 megapixel photos and do extensive Photoshop editing. Most of my PSD files are over 500 MB and many are over 2GB, so opening and saving photos is becoming annoyingly slow. Would I gain much speed by upgrading to a Thunderbolt 2 enclosure for the hard drives, thus effectively doubling the theoretical connection speed from 10 Gpbs to 20 Gpbs? Or are the spinning drives the bottleneck? I can't afford to store my photos on SSD drives. I do have LR and PS on my SSD boot drive, and when I come back from a shoot I put the new photos on the SSD to work on them, but eventually I have to move the photos to the spinning hard drives. By the way, working on photos is fast enough, it's not a problem for me. It's just the opening and saving that is slow. Thanks!
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No speed gain with hard drives. It is the speed of the hard drives that sets the limit. You need to use SSDs to realize the speed of the Thunderbolt bus.
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Agree with David, for a single or small number of spinning rust drives (aka hard drives) there isn't a difference between ThunderBolt1/2/3. Start down the SSD & NVMe route and you can max out what TB3 handle. I would highly recommend adding an external SSD as your 'working' space before moving the finished file to the normal hard drives.