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Author Topic: LR performance with catalog on 5400 vs 7200 rpm drives?  (Read 10500 times)

Phil Indeblanc

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Re: LR performance with catalog on 5400 vs 7200 rpm drives?
« Reply #20 on: January 23, 2015, 08:30:55 pm »

For "noticing" you all forgot to factor in the day and time of week. If you are strictly a weekend photographer and do all the photo work on the weekend and are not so keen on getting things done asap....fogettabout it. Spend the big bucks on a proper set of custom made camera straps.

 :-)
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davidedric

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Re: LR performance with catalog on 5400 vs 7200 rpm drives?
« Reply #21 on: January 24, 2015, 05:34:33 am »

When I got my current machine, the first ssd I'd had, I had software, catalogue and images on the ssd.   Space meant I had to move the images somewhere, so before installing another ssd, I put them on the internal (mirrored) disks.  I didn't do any measurements, but I didn't perceive any performance change, so that is where they have stayed.

Dave
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Hans Kruse

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Re: LR performance with catalog on 5400 vs 7200 rpm drives?
« Reply #22 on: January 24, 2015, 10:56:06 am »

Thanks for all the replies.  I have decided to repurpose an SSD for the catalog, and I'll see if I notice a difference in real life.  

However, I ran some disk benchmarks and was surprised to see the spread for the drive among a direct SATA6 connection (501/246 R/W MB/sec), in a USB 3 2.5" external drive case (307/249), and in a USB 3 external drive "toaster" (215/185).  Of course, I have no idea if these are significant in practice.  The internal 7200 rpm drive the catalog is on now benchmarks at 124/120 (it's on a SATA3 connection, whose throughput I understand is well above the drive's capability).

As I mentioned in earlier responses, I use a MacBook Pro 15" from 2014 and it has an internal drive that is 1TB SSD read and write speed is about 900MB/sec. I have the Lightroom catalog on the SSD as well as my most recent photo folders. The main reason is not performance, but convenience that I do not need to hook up an external drive to work on my photos. I can also go on a trip without copying anything. It's all there on the MBP.

To try out the performance on other external drives I copied the LR catalog and previews to my LaCie thunderbolt raid-1 drive and also to a USB-3 external drive. I opened the catalog from each of the devices and I did scrolling of thumbnails in grid view, went into loupe view and used the arrow key to fo from photo to photo and even holding the arrow key down. There was not a noticeable difference in performance. In each response was immediate and holding down the arrow key in loupe view in each case the window was flying through the pictures. So exactly what I suspected. Lightroom is cpu and memory bound and much less disc i/o bound.

There is situations where i/o speed comes in, e.g. when you open a file into Photoshop in 16 bit from Lightroom and maybe even a pano stitch consisting of mayber 10 or 20 pictures and the result maybe 1GB then there is a very clear difference having everything on an SSD. Doing this on the internal SSD of the MBP is very fast with read and write speeds close to a GB/sec. Also a 7200 rpm drive is as much faster than a 5400 rpm drive with the same interface (except USB2 or similar slow interface, of course).

On a Mac you can get an idea about how much i/o LR does by opening the Activity Monitor and click in disk. Under Windows look at the task manager and you also measure using the performance monitor. There is not a lot of i/o going on during normal LR use of going through the grid view, edit some photos etc. Exporting a lot of photos will of course read all the RAW or TIF files to be exported and write the resulting files, but here a lot of cpu time is spent in rendering the images, so again a mixed pixture.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2015, 10:59:23 am by Hans Kruse »
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