Something is definitely not working right with LR and the way it handles previews.
on my MACs (that have faster storage) I experience no speed issue.
If I need to buy 10Gb interfaced SSDs drives just so LR can load JPEG previews a bit faster, then the problem lies with LR.
I need to buy 10 GbE for Video as well - that was the root cause for me to have a faster connection - I was not satisfied with 400 MB/s on my DAS before since this was still too slow for the amount of data so smoothly load - nothing wrong with the software IMHO
My 2013 system is roughly 10x faster - my new rMBP 13 mid 2017 is even 20x faster being a laptop - that's the reason for having a responsive system.
LR is not the problem.
I would disagree, I have a 2013 27" iMac with 16GB of RAM, it also uses the LR GPU acceleration. LR is the slowest of all the apps for a similar task. For quick browsing, all it has to do it load a JPEG preview, which should be pretty instantaneous on even older system.
which storage system? HDD and fusion drive are not good options
These are all HDDs. HDDS are a very good option if you're on a limited budget, and need reasonable amounts of reliable storage.
Sure - and my point is that with HDDs even USB 3.0 is very adequate since they are much slower than the interface
For example, a 2TB thunderbolt drive starts at over £200(UKP). That's before I go to SSD options.
I own some 150 TB in HDDs - I purely use SSDs for booting and cache in my NAS
Of course it'd be a nice to upgrade to Thunderbolt storage of course, but the cost of the enclosures is pretty scary, and I don't have the option of 10Gb NAS on the iMac. Standard 1Gb Ethernet isn't going to be any advantage over FW800.
yes - buy regularly new machines - financially no big effort
It's nice to have sufficient funds to do that, not all of us do.
I've elaborated that many times - the target is to spend near to nothing over time - just but my tax payback a few days ago - and here is how this works out:
- Buy a new MAC as cheap as you can - there are some nice dealers and deals out - also with 0% interest rate still
- Declare your MAC at the tax office - in case you have a job that demands IT you can do that - almost every job is today dependent on modern IT infrastructure at home => I get 45 % of the purchasing price back over 3 years
- Sell you MAC shortly after the 3 years and you get from a dealer some 40-50 % of the list price => cashout is normally 10-15 % over three years. e.g. a 4 k USD MAC costs you 400-500 USD cashout in three years or in other words 150 USD per year
You can look at it as a kind of very affordable leasing and you get every three years a new machine - this is how I do it and it works pretty well.
USB3 would probably be better, but I've never got those to work properly on my iMac anyway, and for the short time I have tried one, it didn't make any difference to LRs speed.
As said before my MACs have no issue having faster storage.
In case you've wanted to clarify you question - this is it ,-)
And, as I said, having looked into this over a few years, it isn't. There are many variations on this problem, including different base machines with variations of graphic cards, and variations of storage types.
I've owned some dozen MACs and LR run on maybe 5 or 6 of them and I never experienced the behavior you described when I used fast RAID systems - for me the main influence is the storage array - the smallest I've used in the past years was a 4 HDD Raid 0 setup from Akitio => some 300 MB/s - 8 years ago - ever since the speed got better with new RAID systems and the latest incarnation is my NAS with > 900 MB/s
Works extremely satisfying
Putting in faster storage might fix it, but it might not too. I've seen plenty of comments with users on even older hardware, with similar storage on HDDs that don't suffer speed issues at all.
It does - try it - have you personally seen these machines?
I trust very little in forums - there are a lot of misconceptions and wrong user interpretation - I want to see the setup myself - normally I rent stuff and try it out.
With the modern return policy it is easy to rent a raid casing and put in your HDDs and give it a weekend try.
This is how I would approach this topic.
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