External hard disk for use with Lightroom

[new_bloke]

Hi,
I've been using Lightroom for a few years now, and since I've been shooting RAW, the size of my Library has grown to the point where it's really taking up too much space on my Macbook pro internal SSD, occupying around 250GB or so. I'm looking to move some of the older stuff onto an external hard drive and am wondering whether it's worth the extra expense of having a thunderbolt 2 drive over USB3? Has anyone experience of this and could make any recommendation? I've been looking at Lacie porsche design drives for the USB (at around the £100 mark) or d2 for thunderbolt (around £230), both 4TB size.
Any thoughts / suggestions would be most welcome.

cheers NB

[Pot Bellied Fool]

Good question, I've just moved my laptop to an SSD and running out of space already.

I'm a little wary about external hard drives (although with a good backup system in place it shoukld be ok I guess) as I spent many hours in IT Support replacing customer hard drives

Cloud storage for my photos has been suggested (Onedrive or Google Drive generally suggested although there's also dropbox, iCloud etc).

I'll be interested to see what the group consensus is myself as I need to decide what to do too!

[motoroller]

The performance difference for a 4tb won't be huge - USB3 can be saturated by SSDs but not really by HDDs. Thunderbolt will have a lower latency and may have a small difference but I personally wouldn't bother.

[Gad-Westy]

motoroller said:

The performance difference for a 4tb won't be huge - USB3 can be saturated by SSDs but not really by HDDs. Thunderbolt will have a lower latency and may have a small difference but I personally wouldn't bother.

My thoughts exactly. You'll pay far more for something that in the best case you'll get marginal gains from, worst case no different at all.

[StevieBee]

Hi New Bloke!

This resonates with me!

I use Photos and iCloud to catalogue and access my edited images. Both are a bit of a faff but worth the effort to get to know. My images are roughly 60% personal and 40% work. The family can easily access what they want when I'm not around (certainly easier than Lightroom for novices) and I can access work stuff from lap top, phone, tablet, etc (iMac at home). I've upgrade to to the 1TB service on iCloud and have no issues with it.

I have both external hard drives. The thunderbolt one goes everywhere with me (greetings from Jakarta!!)... see below.



The USB Porsche one sits at home. Performance wise, nothing between them to be honest. I just like having the security of a second back up (third if you count iCloud). And the Porsche one looks quite cool at home.

Personally, I'd dump everything to external once you've done editing - especially if you've Photoshop as part of the CC bundle as well.

HTH

[SCEtoAUX]

Whatever you decide, do the file moves in the Lightroom interface, it will track things just fine.

Do it outside of Lightroom and you'll keep having to relink files.

[eein]

I outgrew my lapt HDD years ago, and I was never happy with the resilience of it (and keeping my manual backups was annoying and something I often forgot) ... a failed HDD and professional forensic data recovery later and I decided to find somethign better.

I then ran around with a portable HDD, which was nice as I could sort and edit wherever (i travel lots and am often stuck in airports). But again the resilience and backing up was a pain.

I looked at cloud storage, but I just don't trust any of them to be my primary copy. (T&Cs, relability, security, etc).

So I'm currently keeping all my photos on a QNAP NAS in my house and just accessing them as a mapped drive on my laptop. Performance is ok, obviously slower than a local copy. I then use the QNAP NAS cloud backup to keep a sync-ed copy on the cloud (OneDrive in my caes, although most others are supported. You can have multiple accounts so I can use all 5 x 1TB allowances from my OneDrive account). I like this as my primiary is in my physical house under my control, and the sync to the cloud does not require my laptop to be on - it happens all the time and automatically directly from the NAS to the cloud (ie once it's set up i just forget about it forever until i need it).

I've yet to work out how to automatically have a local sync-ed copy on my laptop that means I can edit and sort offline when travelling. I don't want to have to copy on and copy back off when I get back, so not sure if lightroom can do a 'virtual travelling copy' or something like that?

[motoroller]

I'm toying with the idea of a NAS (Qnap / Synology) for photos and for sharing as well. Just need to find the money!

[Fordo]

You will t see a speed difference between a usb3 or thunderbolt- it’s the actual speed of the hard drive itself that is the determining factor.

Thunderbolts only useful as you can daisychain devices, or if you’re buying a fast raid hard drive array.

I’d get a decent large external usb3 drive. Look for one with decent read / write rates. Generally, the smaller ones that run off usb power are a little slower than the larger ones that run off mains power, but the difference isn’t as big as it used to be. Interestingly, often the larger the drives capacity, the faster the data transfer speeds can be- the data is physically crammed closer together on the drive platter, so the hard drive heads don’t have to move as far

[eein]

motoroller said:

I'm toying with the idea of a NAS (Qnap / Synology) for photos and for sharing as well. Just need to find the money!

I recently set my parents up with a TS-228A entry level unit and was quite happy with it. I had an older top of the range and I don't notice a massive difference for day to day usage. The 228A is dual disk which I RAID-ed but this is not really necessary if you run the cloud backup.

My next experiment is to configure rsync between mine and theirs so I can stop paying for cloud and essentially I have a 'private family cloud'.