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Author Topic: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac  (Read 775 times)

tsinsf

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Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« on: September 26, 2020, 12:36:26 pm »

I have a Mac Pro 2013. My 6 TB of photos are on an external spinning 7200 hard drive. My post processing style is such that I have very large file sizes, most over 500 MB and many between 1000 and 4000. I am constantly re editing these old files, and the slowest part of my workflow is opening and saving the edits (LR and PS are on the boot drive). To speed things up I am considering purchacing the Samsung 8 TB Sata drive for $900 and connecting it with a Sata to USB 3.1 enclosure and cable, and using it as my boot drive. What are the downsides of this proposition?
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Joe Towner

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Re: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« Reply #1 on: September 26, 2020, 01:38:32 pm »

Opening & saving are going top be slow from the HDD.  You can do a direct upgrade to holding these files on a SSD & it'll be much faster.  This is where workflow is important.  You can do a 1/2 TB SSD for your 'active' work, copying files from the spinning rust drives to the SSD, open & save on the SSD, then when done moving the files back to the HDD.

Your Mac has TB ports, so the fastest connection method is the TB1/TB2 ports & a NVMe drive.

Your Mac boot drive is a NVMe drive - the fastest drive out there.  Upgrade it to a larger size, check out MacSales for help. https://eshop.macsales.com/upgrades/mac-pro-12-core-late-2013-2.7-ghz/internal-drives

The USB + SATA is a much slower option compared to any other chip based option.  SATA SSD is limited to 560MB/s and limited again by the USB controller.  NVME's in your Mac run at 1,500MB/s.
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tsinsf

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Re: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« Reply #2 on: September 26, 2020, 04:18:01 pm »

Thank you for your reply. Your suggestion creates extra steps, and my goal is to really minimize extra steps. The only "active work" I ever have is when I return home from a photo trip. I do keep those photos on my internal drive and move them to the external hard drive when I am finished with the first edit. I have all my photo files organized by location in Lightroom and have over thirty locations, and my re edits are taken from all those locations. So creating an active file is not really an option for me. Regarding the use of NVMe drive, the respected  computer site Puget Systems does not recommend spending the extra money for something other than a SATA SSD drive. They claim that the difference is speed for photo work is not significant for most people.
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Joe Towner

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Re: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« Reply #3 on: September 26, 2020, 10:52:24 pm »

If you want to do a SATA SSD for your primary photo storage, go for it. But don't use that same drive as the OS drive for your Mac.  Your internal NVMe drive is significantly faster & designed for being the boot drive.  The QVO drives are the slowest of the SSD's, so it's a trade off between capacity & speed.  You're better off with 2x 4tb drives & split your data between them.

Photoshop wants a NVMe drive.
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tsinsf

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Re: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« Reply #4 on: September 27, 2020, 12:22:11 pm »

OP here. Here is what Puget Systems (a very respected PC company) says about choice of boot drive for use with Photoshop editing:

"What type of storage drive should I use for Photoshop?

There are three main types of drives you might use for a Photoshop workstation: SSD, NVMe, and the traditional platter drive. Of these three, traditional platter drives are the slowest but are extremely affordable and available in much larger capacities than SSD or NVMe drives. Due to this, they make excellent long-term storage drives, but are not ideal for OS or scratch drives.

SSDs are several times faster than a platter drive but are also more expensive. These drives are excellent for a wide range of tasks such as holding your OS and applications, storing projects, and as scratch drives.

NVMe drives come in two flavors (M.2 and U.2), but either one will be significantly faster than even an SSD drive. They are about 30% more expensive than an SSD, but in return are up to five times faster! However, in most cases you will not see much of a performance increase with an NVMe drive since a modern standard SSD is already fast enough that it is rarely a performance bottleneck. These drives can be used as an OS and application drive to make your system boot and launch programs a bit faster, but in most cases they are a luxury item for Photoshop."
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sbay

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Re: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« Reply #5 on: September 27, 2020, 12:34:12 pm »

the slowest part of my workflow is opening and saving the edits (LR and PS are on the boot drive). To speed things up I am considering purchacing the Samsung 8 TB Sata drive for $900 and connecting it with a Sata to USB 3.1 enclosure and cable, and using it as my boot drive. What are the downsides of this proposition?

The bottleneck may or may not be the drive. If you are using TIF compression (zip) or PSB files (compression enabled by default), the slowest part of the save/open is running the computations to compress /decompress the data and not reading or writing to disk. So a faster disk won't help significantly.

If you turn compression off, it will be much faster to read / write files but the disk size will balloon. And then you will hit the 4GB file size limit for TIF.

kers

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Re: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« Reply #6 on: September 27, 2020, 03:15:45 pm »

The bottleneck may or may not be the drive. If you are using TIF compression (zip) or PSB files (compression enabled by default), the slowest part of the save/open is running the computations to compress /decompress the data and not reading or writing to disk. So a faster disk won't help significantly.

If you turn compression off, it will be much faster to read / write files but the disk size will balloon. And then you will hit the 4GB file size limit for TIF.

+1
and i read your computer has an ssd drive - is that correct?
or is it a normal Hd or an inbetween?
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tsinsf

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Re: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« Reply #7 on: September 27, 2020, 04:35:07 pm »

My boot drive is a 1 TB NVMe SSD, Appleā€™s proprietary version.
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Joe Towner

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Re: Downsides of using an external SSD as boot drive for Mac
« Reply #8 on: September 28, 2020, 12:13:58 pm »

OP here. Here is what Puget Systems (a very respected PC company) says about choice of boot drive for use with Photoshop editing:

"What type of storage drive should I use for Photoshop?

NVMe is the absolute best storage medium for your boot drive, your swap drive, your application drive - on every computer, every day of the week.  You work against that NVMe drive when you do your initial dump of photos from a trip - is that the performance you're trying to re-create for your entire photo library?  An external SATA SSD is 1/4 to 1/3 the speed of your internal drive.

I'm glad you've taken my advise to not use an external drive as your boot drive.

Nothing I have told you is in disagreement with Puget Systems's recommendation, and I'm going to remind you that you're working with a 'luxury' computer. I'm not recommending NVMe for the 6tb of storage, and I suggested the cheapest method of improving things is by adjusting your workflow.  Since that doesn't work for you, there are options but the cost can be all over the board.  A single 8tb drive, splitting to 2x 4tb solo drives or even 4x 2tb drives with SoftRAID. Or a Lacie Big or Drobo, not that i would personally use either.  A small NAS with 10gbE would also be an option, but I wouldn't recommend that for your setup.

You're at that unfortunate position of being in the 5-10tb of storage required, so not fitting into a normal SSD, but also not needing a large multi-drive array with higher capacity.  There are 8tb SSD drives, but I don't recommend them due to the cost per GB, and the all your eggs in a single drive.

Flip thru other threads on storage here on LuLa and you'll see my opinions for others.
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