Lightroom with SSD - best way to install ?

mikeyw

mikeyw

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Hi,

Recently moved to an i5 quad with 120Gb SSD and 1.5TB Sata to hopefully improve performance.

The SSD has 2 partitions one with windows on.

How would people install lightroom and split installation / cat files / images etc to hopefully get best performance.

tia,
Mike.
 
I installed another 2nd drive in my computer which is easy to do. This one is an HDD drive the "c" drive is SSD




All my photos are on that a well as on extrnl drives. Doing this saves space on your SSD "C" drive for other things
 
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I only keep the operating system and programs on my ssd. All data goes on my hard disk. I too have an i5 quad processor. I find both photoshop and lightroom quite fast enough now. More important though is having enough memory, I have16 Gb which I consider the minimum with such data heavy programs.
 
Yes i too installed 16 GB of RAM and also a 750w power unit which can cope with anything I throw at it..A lot of shop computers have a miserly 350w PU which I don't think is really up to the added tasks one may put on the computer all running at the same time.
 
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I've found lightroom (classic) doesn't use more than about 6GB max, so don't bust a gut about more ram if it's not cheap.

Put your catalogue and caches on SSD (on a separate partition helps). I'd also recommend putting the "working set" of photos on SSD too, that makes the UI a lot more responsive. Everything you've finished working on archive it off to the spinning rust.

Also, ditch windows defender as it tends to suck, get another A/V brand. But Lightroom will absorb whatever money you throw at the hardware and come back wanting more at times, that's just the nature of the beast. Make the best of what you have and chill, Adobe doesn't care unless you have a dual-socket graphics workstation.

Btw my top end i7 4th gen maxes out at 85W, so that plus a mid range GPU, two sticks of ram and a couple of SSDs you're barely scratching 200W flat out. PSUs need to run at 50-80% capacity to be at their most efficient, so again don't worry too much about that unless you see stability issues.
 
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Some quite small programs such as PTAssembler, for stitching pans, can use far more resources than Lightroom . It can use as many cores and threads as you can throw at it, and as the memory is divided equally between them, it can use as much as you can afford. Some pans with only a few images can be processed all at the same time, each by its own thread. Pans that used to take many minutes can now be completes in seconds.
Recent updates of light room seem to have speeded it up quite a lot so is probably making better use of the cores.
 
Mr Perceptive said:
Definitely put the catalog on the SSD, but make sure you set the folder for the catalog backup onto your other drive.
Click to expand...

And the cache. Not sure having a second partition on the SSD makes any sense.
SSD's are cheap enough that it's worth getting a small one, 100Gb+, for lightroom cache and catalogue. OS and program install onto the existing SSD
 
Thanks guys - some great advice, sadly no more capacity for another SSD.

Previously my images were all stored on my C:

On the new PC they could well be on the F: drive as the SSD will be the C: drive.

When i install lightroom do i need to restore from the backup file that gets created when i exit lightroom and tell it my directory structure for the photos now resides on F: not C: ?

tia,
Mike.
 
In that case get an extrnl drive, either SSD or HDD and plug into a USB3 port.
 
My set up is a 480GB SSD for my main photos, A 1.5TB Hard drive for older photos that have been worked on, not needing working on, etc then I have an old 120GB SSD I had lying around which I use for the Lightroom catalog and Photoshop scratch disk. The operating system is on a 256GB M.2 NVME SSD along with Photoshop and Lightroom programs.

I find this to give me the quickest speed when using PS and LR.

Another small SSD for your catalog and scratch wouldn't cost you too much, £35-£45 iirc without looking.
 
I have a SSD WD 250 gb M.2 plugged directly into my motherboard. which leaves me both Hard disks slots free. One is occupied with a "TB hard drive for data. and the other is still free.
But intend to fit another SSd in it sometime soon. I back up to usb3 external drives.
 
Terrywoodenpic said:
I have a SSD WD 250 gb M.2 plugged directly into my motherboard. which leaves me both Hard disks slots free. One is occupied with a "TB hard drive for data. and the other is still free.
But intend to fit another SSd in it sometime soon. I back up to usb3 external drives.
Click to expand...

Mine is the same, fits straight into the motherboard. I have two m.2 slots in total but each one uses up a sata port so you have to reduce the number of physical drives for each m.2 ssd you use. I am hoping to get another m.2 ssd soon to replace the 120gb ssd my catalog is on now.
 
ChrisWXM said:
Mine is the same, fits straight into the motherboard. I have two m.2 slots in total but each one uses up a sata port so you have to reduce the number of physical drives for each m.2 ssd you use. I am hoping to get another m.2 ssd soon to replace the 120gb ssd my catalog is on now.
Click to expand...
I have a m.2 as C drive and they are really good and fast, then I have 4 SSD for all the different caches and about a dozen hard drives of 6TB each.
But I do mostly 4k video and 8k timelapses. Very, very heavy workflow
 
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