Samsung T7 Shield Using Lightroom

[kgphotos]

Hi. I am going to be getting an M3 MAX 16/40/16 with 1TB SSD storage. Since Apple’s pricing to upgrade to 2TB is an extra $400, I am leaning towards an external SSD. I’d like to store my photos and edit off the external SSD using Adobe Lightroom. I am looking at the Samsung T7 Shield. I’ve read some threads on here about it and it seems like a great SSD. Will it be fast enough to edit photos on using Lighroom? I will also likely be using this drive to plug in to my iPad when i am out taking photos and doing edits.

Thanks for your advice!

 

[raythompsontn]

Yes, it will. Some file operations may be a little slower but not enough to be a concern. Importing, building previews, and exporting may be slightly affected. Actual editing you will never notice the difference. I use an external SSD with Lightroom and speed is fine. I import from a high speed reader and that is probably the slowest part.

My only concern is the power drain on the Mac. Keeping a Sandisk SSD plugged in seems to have an adverse effect on the battery drain. My battery life on my M2 Air will drop by about 25% with the SSD plugged in versus the SSD not plugged in. I don't know if Samsung functions the same way. On the power adapter there is no concern.

 

[Fishrrman]

Something to keep in mind.

If you're going to use an external SSD as your "primary photo storage", you'll also need at least one backup for that drive, as well.

It could either be another SSD or a platter-based hard drive.

To maintain the backup as "an exact copy" of the primary storage SSD, I'd suggest either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner. Both are free to download and try for 30 days.

 

[herbert7265]

As @raythompsontn has already stated, LrC works fine from a Samsung T7 (Shield).

Personally I have my images stored on the external SSD and the LrC catalogue on my internal SSD, as I have enough space. But in a trial I did, even storing the catalogue on the external SSD didn’t slow down my work in a way that I really could recognize it. So you should be fine with either option.

As @Fishrrman has stated, think about to have at least one backup SSD for your external SSD. Using Carbon Cpy Cloner the backups are really fast and uncomplicated.

Herbert

 

[kgphotos]

Thank you everyone. Ordered!

 

[maxsquared]

I do exactly this, photos on T7 shield and having the files sync with Google Drive.