Lightroom catalog location - new 27" iMac

[CalfCanuck]

I currently have about 200,000 images (mostly RAW) in Lightroom. I have the catalog on a 512 GB Crucial M4 SSD residing on an external OWC ThunderBay IV housing, with fast HDD's that hold my images and other files, plus a bay for swapping BU HDDs. The M4 SSD tests about 500 MB/sec for read, and 250 MB/sec for writes, if my memory holds. The ThunderBay uses Thunderbolt 1 at 10 Gb/s, but I suspect even with overhead I am not saturating the Thunderbolt connection, so I am happy with the current setup.

I just ordered a tricked out 27" iMac w/1 TB SSD (I will still use my wide gamut NEC PA271 for color work) and Barefeats tested the internal PCIe storage at a whopping 2884 MB/sec Read, and 2127 MB/sec Write. Will add in memory to hit 40 GB of RAM.

http://barefeats.com/imac2017_storage.html

While I have stayed away from having my LR catalog on my system disk in the past to prevent slow performance, the Barefeats test numbers are so crazy fast that I am planning on moving the catalog on to the 1TB internal flash flash.

Can anyone think of any reason I should reconsider?

 

[MCAsan]

Tell us how it all worked out.

 

[Chancha]

Lightroom does not care if you move the catalog and the RAW photos around different drives, all you need to do is to point LR to the new location every time you move them, or if you can move within LR. Once you get your new iMac you can test yourself if the speed gain of putting them all internally is great enough to consider not using the external.

I myself also have the 2017 maxed out 27" iMac, but since I got a 100k+ photo library, my actual RAWs are on a G-RAID TB3 8+8TB enclosure (with 400MB/s), where the LR catalog and IRdata is on the iMac internal SSD (which is hovering about <100GB with a lot of 1:1 and smart previews). This way I get a perfect balance between speed and capacity. Culling is really fast, and I only hear the HDDs work when ever I make adjustments where the actual RAW needs to be reloaded to the computer, which is still fast just not 2000MB/s fast.

Some other photographers with demanding workflow like to work entirely on the internal SSD for maximum performance, then once the job is finished, all the RAWs are migrated to slower arrays for archive purpose.

 

[ViperDesign]

have you guys thought about moving the images to the new lightroom CC? Now I don't have as many photo's as you guys, mine is only 34,000 but I moved them all online

 

[MCAsan]

Personally I dropped all Adobe many months. The Lightroom CC makes me glad I did that. I would Photos before Lightroom CC. At least with Photos there are Extensions to use. There are no Lightroom CC plugins....etc.

 

[Chancha]

have you guys thought about moving the images to the new lightroom CC? Now I don't have as many photo's as you guys, mine is only 34,000 but I moved them all online

The sheer amount and complexity of my projects pretty much keep me from migrating to cloud only any time soon, Adobe or not. The biggest issue is the single catalog approach, which is obviously easier for cloud sync purposes, but it is not how actual photographers work, particularly in groups / studios of multiple persons.

Wake us up whenever LR CC gains workgroup level of cooperative tools.

 

[MCAsan]

First it needs to have and support plugins.

 

[bopajuice]

have you guys thought about moving the images to the new lightroom CC? Now I don't have as many photo's as you guys, mine is only 34,000 but I moved them all online

Please elaborate. Online like in iCloud, some other cloud site. Please tell me your set up. I am desperately looking for a solution to manage my terabyte worth of photos from the last 15 years.
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Lightroom does not care if you move the catalog and the RAW photos around different drives, all you need to do is to point LR to the new location every time you move them, or if you can move within LR. Once you get your new iMac you can test yourself if the speed gain of putting them all internally is great enough to consider not using the external.

I myself also have the 2017 maxed out 27" iMac, but since I got a 100k+ photo library, my actual RAWs are on a G-RAID TB3 8+8TB enclosure (with 400MB/s), where the LR catalog and IRdata is on the iMac internal SSD (which is hovering about <100GB with a lot of 1:1 and smart previews). This way I get a perfect balance between speed and capacity. Culling is really fast, and I only hear the HDDs work when ever I make adjustments where the actual RAW needs to be reloaded to the computer, which is still fast just not 2000MB/s fast.

Some other photographers with demanding workflow like to work entirely on the internal SSD for maximum performance, then once the job is finished, all the RAWs are migrated to slower arrays for archive purpose.

Could I use a NAS to manage and store a Lightroom library?

 

[Alexander.Of.Oz]

First it needs to have and support plugins.

I have the whole set of Topaz plugins and quite a few others loaded in Lightroom Classic CC. I right click on the image I'm editing and choose "Edit In", it sends the image to the plugin and when I'm finished, it sends the edited image back to Lightroom, whilst leaving the original there too.

 

[Chancha]

Could I use a NAS to manage and store a Lightroom library?

In theory yes, but ideally no. The transfer speed is not an issue if compared to a DAS (1000Mb(125MB/s) LAN vs 200MB/s or so HDDs), but the multi-user nature of NAS is. If more than one computer access and modify the LR catalog database, it stands a high chance to be corrupted.

But I have seen people offloading just the RAWs to NAS, and then keep the catalog database local (SSD). I myself do it similarly, a primary iMac having catalog on internal SSD, RAWs on TB3 connected RAID, enable AFP network sharing of this iMac so that the TB3 volume is visible over LAN, then when needed I can copy the catalog to a MBP and work "remotely" within the WLAN. The catch is to manage the updated database and keep a most recent copy back on the primary iMac. I believe there are 3rd party local workgroup sync solutions around to do this automatically but I haven't looked much into it as I only do this sparingly.

 

[ChrisA]

....
While I have stayed away from having my LR catalog on my system disk in the past to prevent slow performance, the Barefeats test numbers are so crazy fast that I am planning on moving the catalog on to the 1TB internal flash flash.

In the days of mechanical rotating storage there was good reason to never place your data on eat system disk. Onthose devices the data is stored at a specific location and the read/write heads had to be physically moved over the data in order thread it. Placing the data and system on the same device meant you had to wait while the heads moved. They might spend more time moving them reading

With an SSD, any SSD, there are no heads to move and you get best performance by placing everyone on the fastest SSD and then only data you rarely use on the hard drive.

In your case your best option is to place the system and the LR index files on the system disk and the RAW images on a larger device The device that holds the RAW files does not need to be fast but the device that holds the index should be as fast as you can afford.

Also, all this talk about performance only makes sense if you have already maxed out the RAM. RAM is the best way to make the system run fast. With enough RAN the index gets cached in RAM