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Optimum Hard Drive Config for Lightroom 5

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ArvinC

ArvinC

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Hello everyone!


Finally putting together my latest PC build this weekend. It will be Intel Haswell based, with a total of 32 Gigs of RAM. I already have one 128 GB SSD from my current rig which will be re-purposed in my new one. This drive will contain Windows 7 Ultimate and MS Office 2010. I will have a 2-TB hard drive for other programs, music, etc. and a 3-TB hard drive for my photo & video storage. I plan on adding a second SSD for Lightroom 5 to use (both SSD's will be 6 GB SATA spec) for a total of 4 drives installed in the new rig.

My question is, what's the best way to configure the second SSD for optimum use with LR5? Do I install LR5 to this drive, or install it with the rest of the programs on the 2-TB drive? Do I keep this SSD solely for LR5's to use as its "catalog" drive and if so, will 128 GB be enough? IOW, does LR5 manage the content of this drive or do I have to manage it manually to make sure it doesn't fill-up? Also, I plan on installing Elements 11 for added editing functionality.

Thanks for any tips or info!

Arvin
 
Solution
VirtualMirage
ArvinC said:
ArvinC wrote:

Hello everyone!

Finally putting together my latest PC build this weekend. It will be Intel Haswell based, with a total of 32 Gigs of RAM. I already have one 128 GB SSD from my current rig which will be re-purposed in my new one. This drive will contain Windows 7 Ultimate and MS Office 2010. I will have a 2-TB hard drive for other programs, music, etc. and a 3-TB hard drive for my photo & video storage. I plan on adding a second SSD for Lightroom 5 to use (both SSD's will be 6 GB SATA spec) for a total of 4 drives installed in the new rig.

My question is, what's the best way to configure the second SSD for optimum use with LR5? Do I install LR5 to this drive, or install it with the rest of the programs on the 2-TB...
Click to expand...
I think you just need to have the programme installed on the SSD but keep your pictures and catalogue on the 3 TB drive. One piece of advice I received was to tell LR to back up to a separate HD - your 2 TB disc would do. Then you have a backup on a different disc if the main one fails. But also back up the entire catalogue and photos files regularly to an external HDD.

--
jwhig
 
Last edited:
LR configuration is not that complicated. You have control over:

1. Where the software is installed.

2. Where the catalog is placed.

3. Where the cache is placed.

4. Where your images reside.

You want 1, 2, and 3 on SSD for performance. It doesn't matter much which SSD and there really isn't much advantage in having more than one, except for the added capacity.

With conventional HDD's one tries to split the workload across drives to get parallel seeks and latency. But SSD's render this largely moot.

You do want to try and split the storage somewhat evenly for performance and minimum wear. Also bad things can happen if the system drive becomes full or almost full so you want to avoid that.

If you have 1, 2 and 3 on SSD, you're basically done. Fretting over all of the other stuff just isn't going to produce any rewards.
 
Member said:
malch wrote:

LR configuration is not that complicated. You have control over:

1. Where the software is installed.

2. Where the catalog is placed.

3. Where the cache is placed.

4. Where your images reside.

You want 1, 2, and 3 on SSD for performance. It doesn't matter much which SSD and there really isn't much advantage in having more than one, except for the added capacity.

With conventional HDD's one tries to split the workload across drives to get parallel seeks and latency. But SSD's render this largely moot.

You do want to try and split the storage somewhat evenly for performance and minimum wear. Also bad things can happen if the system drive becomes full or almost full so you want to avoid that.

If you have 1, 2 and 3 on SSD, you're basically done. Fretting over all of the other stuff just isn't going to produce any rewards.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the answers, guys!

One more question: Does the LR5 Catalog contain full-size files of the images, or simply scaled-down versions of the actual file located somewhere else, i.e. on another hard drive?

Arvin
 
jwhig said:
jwhig wrote:

I think you just need to have the programme installed on the SSD but keep your pictures and catalogue on the 3 TB drive.
Click to expand...
This seems exactly backwards. Once LR is launched and loaded into RAM, what is the SSD advantage? The catalog, cache and working image files should benefit from faster access however. In the end, most testing I've done myself and read about as performed by others indicates that LR is heavily processor bound and no amount of drive juggling will fix that.
 
Last edited:
You may want to read this article. The author tested a bunch of different combinations of installation locations to see what worked the best. The differences may not be as large as you would expect.
 
Ron AKA said:
Ron AKA wrote:

You may want to read this article. The author tested a bunch of different combinations of installation locations to see what worked the best. The differences may not be as large as you would expect.
Click to expand...
I think there is some unfortunate phrasing in that article. It says two things and many folks come away hearing one and not the other:

1. It says that a SSD does not significantly improve preview rendering performance. I agree but this is hardly surprising given it's a CPU intensive process.

2. But it also says...

"Well, Lightroom isn’t just about rendering Library previews or loading photos into the the Develop module editing window. At Lightroom’s heart is a SQLite database, and the very fast access times associated with SSDs means that reading metadata from the catalog, searching the catalog, etc will be noticeably faster than on a conventional disk drive. Likewise, Library module thumbnail and preview scrolling (sometimes referred to as louping) will be noticeably faster and smoother."
 
ArvinC said:
ArvinC wrote:

Hello everyone!

Finally putting together my latest PC build this weekend. It will be Intel Haswell based, with a total of 32 Gigs of RAM. I already have one 128 GB SSD from my current rig which will be re-purposed in my new one. This drive will contain Windows 7 Ultimate and MS Office 2010. I will have a 2-TB hard drive for other programs, music, etc. and a 3-TB hard drive for my photo & video storage. I plan on adding a second SSD for Lightroom 5 to use (both SSD's will be 6 GB SATA spec) for a total of 4 drives installed in the new rig.

My question is, what's the best way to configure the second SSD for optimum use with LR5? Do I install LR5 to this drive, or install it with the rest of the programs on the 2-TB drive? Do I keep this SSD solely for LR5's to use as its "catalog" drive and if so, will 128 GB be enough? IOW, does LR5 manage the content of this drive or do I have to manage it manually to make sure it doesn't fill-up? Also, I plan on installing Elements 11 for added editing functionality.

Thanks for any tips or info!

Arvin
Click to expand...
 
Solution
Ho72 said:
Ho72 wrote:
Ho72 said:
jwhig wrote:

I think you just need to have the programme installed on the SSD but keep your pictures and catalogue on the 3 TB drive.
Click to expand...
This seems exactly backwards. Once LR is launched and loaded into RAM, what is the SSD advantage? The catalog, cache and working image files should benefit from faster access however. In the end, most testing I've done myself and read about as performed by others indicates that LR is heavily processor bound and no amount of drive juggling will fix that.
Click to expand...
Processor bound? I guess it depends on your system, but it certainly isn't processor bound on my 3770K yet it will still slowdown when processing some things. I believe this has more to do with some poor coding, poor optimization, plus some bugs in the application. Very rarely do I ever see my overall CPU surpass 50-60%. Despite having 4 physical cores with hyperthreading, showing up as 8 CPUs in Task Manager, Lightroom never seems to want to use more than two CPUs heavily at any given time. And when I mean heavily, the load may go up to 60% max on those CPUs. Yet Lightroom will be at a crawl. This is evident on LR4 and LR5, not really with LR3.6 and earlier.

The SSD advantage will be primarily for the catalog and previews. The whole catalog and all the previews are not pre-loaded into the RAM, otherwise I would be noticing a whole lot more of memory consumption than the less than 2GB I see Lightroom using. Part of the catalog and previews might be, but not all of it.

Responding to jwhig's comment that you were responding to, I would not recommend putting the catalog on the 3TB drive. You'll be shooting yourself in the foot for doing that. If you have an SSD and have space for the catalog and previews (they go hand in hand and cannot be separated), then keep it on the SSD. Lightroom is pulling from this and is constantly reading and writing to the catalog, you want this connection to be as fast as possible. As for the pictures, those can stay on the 3TB. The pictures are not being edited directly, that information is stored via the previews and the catalog. The pictures are accessed when importing, creating preview files, and I believe briefly when doing the initial image load to view 100% when in the develop module. Otherwise the catalog and previews are what Lightroom relies on when viewing the library, sorting, creating keywords, filtering a search, editing the photo after the initial 1:1 image creation.

Try scrolling through several hundred photos quickly in the Library module where the catalog/previews reside on a regular hard drive and try it again with it on an SSD. There is a very noticeable performance improvement. Preview thumbnails generate faster, less hitching, faster filtering, etc.
 
VirtualMirage said:
VirtualMirage wrote:

Processor bound? I guess it depends on your system, but it certainly isn't processor bound on my 3770K yet it will still slowdown when processing some things. I believe this has more to do with some poor coding, poor optimization, plus some bugs in the application. Very rarely do I ever see my overall CPU surpass 50-60%. Despite having 4 physical cores with hyperthreading, showing up as 8 CPUs in Task Manager, Lightroom never seems to want to use more than two CPUs heavily at any given time. And when I mean heavily, the load may go up to 60% max on those CPUs. Yet Lightroom will be at a crawl. This is evident on LR4 and LR5, not really with LR3.6 and earlier.
Click to expand...
It may very well be poorly optimized for multi-threaded/hyper-threaded hardware. But it's still processor bound and faster disks still won't change that.

I do think Adobe make something of wrong turn with 4.0 and performance nosedived. They really need to address that to get back on track.
VirtualMirage said:
Responding to jwhig's comment that you were responding to, I would not recommend putting the catalog on the 3TB drive. You'll be shooting yourself in the foot for doing that. If you have an SSD and have space for the catalog and previews (they go hand in hand and cannot be separated), then keep it on the SSD.
Click to expand...
I agree. SQL databases love SSD's and having the catalog on SSD will help many LR functions significantly. However, sadly not RAW conversion and rendering.
 
Perhaps some of the best testing to date on LR performance.

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1220376

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1220523

Conclusions

I think you’ve pretty much guessed it – within the scope of this testing at least, SSD’s offer no real benefit for LR, and I must conclude that LR is limited primarily by CPU horsepower and not disk I/O. I admit i expected that as a general result, but i am surprised to see *no* measurable benefit for having a faster disk subsystem. Still, i can't argue with the numbers. I would note that the results suggest faster memory would also be beneficial, but without testing it I can’t say how great the impact would be: Intel CPU’s have extremely good pre-fetching algorithms and large caches nowadays, so i wouldn’t expect too much from superfast RAM.

The author concedes that results vis-a-vis SSDs might be different with larger catalogs than he had available at the time of the test.
 
Last edited:
Ho72 said:
Ho72 wrote:

Perhaps some of the best testing to date on LR performance.

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1220376

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1220523

Conclusions

I think you’ve pretty much guessed it – within the scope of this testing at least, SSD’s offer no real benefit for LR, and I must conclude that LR is limited primarily by CPU horsepower and not disk I/O. I admit i expected that as a general result, but i am surprised to see *no* measurable benefit for having a faster disk subsystem. Still, i can't argue with the numbers. I would note that the results suggest faster memory would also be beneficial, but without testing it I can’t say how great the impact would be: Intel CPU’s have extremely good pre-fetching algorithms and large caches nowadays, so i wouldn’t expect too much from superfast RAM.

The author concedes that results vis-a-vis SSDs might be different with larger catalogs than he had available at the time of the test.
Click to expand...
The specific tests used place really no stress on the i/o system. It is therefore hardly surprising the author would conclude that disk speed doesn't matter.

In my experience, Lightroom is noticeably more responsive on a system with a SSD. But one would need very different tests to show it. Such tests would also be considerably more difficult (complicated) to setup.

For starters, there's little point in carrying out tests on a single image since that image will likely be held or cached in RAM. The performance delta between SSD and HDD is simply moot in that situation.

OTOH, things like catalog searches and library scrolling are likely to result in significant physical i/o and the SSD will win that race very comfortably since average access times are at least an order of magnitude faster.
 
Ho72 said:
Ho72 wrote:

Perhaps some of the best testing to date on LR performance.

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1220376

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1220523

Conclusions

I think you’ve pretty much guessed it – within the scope of this testing at least, SSD’s offer no real benefit for LR, and I must conclude that LR is limited primarily by CPU horsepower and not disk I/O. I admit i expected that as a general result, but i am surprised to see *no* measurable benefit for having a faster disk subsystem. Still, i can't argue with the numbers. I would note that the results suggest faster memory would also be beneficial, but without testing it I can’t say how great the impact would be: Intel CPU’s have extremely good pre-fetching algorithms and large caches nowadays, so i wouldn’t expect too much from superfast RAM.

The author concedes that results vis-a-vis SSDs might be different with larger catalogs than he had available at the time of the test.
Click to expand...
While detailed and fairly thorough, there are quite a few flaws in their method (some of which you state they conceded in). The biggest one I will focus on is testing a catalog of only 200 images. This is not enough to stress the I/O and begin to hit the limitations of a drive. With only 200 images, that is nothing. My spindle drive would react fast enough to not complain about and would spit up previews with little fuss. But try doing the same thing and browse a catalog library of 60,000 images with folders containing as many as 10,000 images. Then add the larger files size of working with 24-36MP RAW files. If I read correctly, this person was only using RAWs from cameras that are 12MP (with exception to one large TIFF panoramic). Once you put all that together, you quickly find out that the spindle drive will not be able to keep up generating the previews or thumbnails as you quickly sift through your images. Instead, you'll get a bunch of grey boxes as placeholders. Same goes for when you start searching or using filters.

The majority of the other things he was testing were more reliant on processing power than drive speed. Importing speed is dependent on CPU power and the speed of what you are importing from. Frankly, I don't really care much about import speed. I already know my memory card and reader is going to be the slowest link. I usually pop it in, click import and walk away. A fast SSD is going to do nothing for me here until I can fix that bottleneck. The Develop module performance is mainly CPU and RAM. There is more I could elaborate on, but won't.

Also consider the times they captured and the little disparity between the drive types. While it only seemed like a few seconds separated them, that again was on just a few images. Now double, triple, quadruple, or multiple that several hundred fold and watch as the difference in seconds turn into minutes, which can turn into hours.

Their idea and thought process was pretty sound, but the sample size was not realistic and some tests were focusing on the wrong performance counters.

Having used LR 2, 3, 4, and 5 on multiple drive configuration layouts in a real world environment, I will stick with my conclusions on the performances gained from using SSD.
 
Ho72 said:
Ho72 wrote:

I agree the gains are real enough if LR's support files (catalog, LR/ACR cache, and, in my case, working image) are on SSD. Having the LR program on SSD contributes nothing to the equation except that it launches faster. Given that so many people are using SSD for their system disk these days, LR usually ends up being installed there by default so it ends up being a moot point.

The biggest annoyances that I see folks complaining about (slider response in the develop module and rendering speed being among the primary ones) still, AFAIK, are governed by processor performance. There are some who are complaining about a lag in the healing brush (LR5) that could be disk I/O related if writing to XMP and those files are not on SSD.

Speaking of LR5, it appears that it is slower than 4 in some respects, at least from what I've read. No first hand experience since I'm still using 4 here.
Click to expand...
From what I am seeing on the forums, the slow performance still appears random with LR5 as it did with LR4.

From my experience, I am one of those "random" people where LR4 would degrade in performance in the develop module with lag increasing, etc. When I moved to LR5, I saw the performance improve at first in many areas. But it begins to do the same thing when in the develop module as LR4 did, it'll even degrade further and starts running even worse than LR4. Plus, there appears to be quite a few bugs left in LR5 that I have noticed as well that they need to work out. Shame too, because there are features and improvements in LR5 that I feel makes it a justified upgrade over LR4. Hopefully, they fix these.
 
Member said:
malch wrote:

LR configuration is not that complicated. You have control over:

1. Where the software is installed.

2. Where the catalog is placed.

3. Where the cache is placed.

4. Where your images reside.

You want 1, 2, and 3 on SSD for performance. It doesn't matter much which SSD and there really isn't much advantage in having more than one, except for the added capacity.

With conventional HDD's one tries to split the workload across drives to get parallel seeks and latency. But SSD's render this largely moot.

You do want to try and split the storage somewhat evenly for performance and minimum wear. Also bad things can happen if the system drive becomes full or almost full so you want to avoid that.

If you have 1, 2 and 3 on SSD, you're basically done. Fretting over all of the other stuff just isn't going to produce any rewards.
Click to expand...
Where do you configure/determine where LR cache is placed?
 
I built specifically LR5 PC 2 months ago and I'm happy. I shoot 40 000 FF RAW's per annum. My disk conf is easy. First, I bought system board with fast SATA III connectors and USB 3. I have 256GB fast enterprise SSD and fastest 3TB Seagate Constellation with 64MB cache. My Win and LR5 are on SDD, also LR catalogue (most important for fast and responsive workflow). All current photos (I shoot ca 1TB RAW photos per year) are on internal 3TB HDD. Photos are imported via USB3 reaser from fast 95MB/s UHS SD cards. Then I have 16TB Synology Diskstation in RAID 5 conf (4x4TB, 12 TB net space) for archive. Current year is also constantly backed up to Synology NAS.
 
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