I've been finding ways to greatly improve the speed of my LR
environment. Over the past couple of months, I've discovered several
significant things that have completely revolutionized the experience:
1. SSD external work drive for my active/current catalog/images.
2. Retirement of the Seagate drive that uses SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording).
3. Adjustment of the "Preview" settings.
4. Macbook Pro
I just wanted to make mention of the external hard drive situation.
The Seagate drives are quite fast as long as your read/writes are
within the buffer. But a high volume throughput will bright the drive
to its knees. For example, if you import 100 raw files, you'll see
that the drive has to pause every few seconds to catch its breath
before continuing. It starts out fast, but by the 10th file, it takes
potty breaks that last for 5-10 seconds. It is especially bad if you
are doing ANYTHING else with the drive at the same time. Seagate has
been trying to refine this a bit more and the lag times are different
from one model or batch to the next. When the Seagate drives are on
their game, they are fantastic. They actually do very well for
lower-interaction applications.
Another observance on throughputs is with the WD (Western Digital)
drives. Of my drives, the 2TB drives appear to be the quickest ones,
with the 4T being about half as fast. It looks like this is a buffer
issue, combined with the encryption process. I believe that the drive
encryption process will halve performance of the drives, regardless of
size. While the performance is a little lacking, I think the WD My
Passport Ultra 2TB or 4TB is one of the very best external drives
available with a good mix of performance and features.
At Bestbuy, you can get the WD Easystore drives. These are an
interesting mixed bag. I believe the actual HD itself is superior to
the Passport series, but the feature set is lighter. The housing isn't
as robust and it lacks the encryption engine. My testing shows that my
5TB Easystore is about 50% faster than the 4TB My Passport Ultra.
These are real-world numbers for actual LR use, not theoretical.
I recently acquired a 1TB Samsung T5 external SSD. This is now my
primary Lightroom work drive. I have my 2018 and 2019 libraries and
catalogs on it and I use it on whichever laptop I want to tote with me
that day. Seamless use between the Macbook Pro and the Lenovos. Every
few days I will copy everything back to my regular hard drives so I
have no less than three copies now, with one being kept offsite. Real
world speed? I see about a 100-200% improvement in usable speed.
That's about all.
Why?
Because the drive is now so fast that I'm actually being held back to
the computer itself. With a spinny hard drive, there was little actual
performance difference between my computers, but with the SSD, I get
much more variance across the computers as the processor and memory is
getting tapped out.
Which brings me to the subject of the Macbook Pro. My Lenovo laptops
and the Apple are of the same general generation. While the Lenovos
have Intel i5 chips, the Apple has i7. That right there will
definitely yield greater performance. Yet, it's not across the boards.
The i7 isn't magically faster in EVERYTHING. As the Processor and GPU
are essentially one and the same in the Macbook Pro, if you something
intense going on with the screen, the processor will have to back off
on real work to accommodate it. The Lenovos keep this separate and I
don't get the variability in processing performance like I do with the
Macbook Pro.
Related to this is processor slowdown due to thermal control. All
three of my laptops will protect themselves and slow the processor
down after a bit, but my oldest Lenovo is the best at maintaining
maximum speed as the cooling fan will go crazy. The Macbook Pro's fan
will also kick into high gear, but the processor will step down at the
same time. The newer Lenovo has no cooling fan (or vents) of any form
and will slowdown and stay silent. However, that Lenovo actually stays
faster longer as it seems designed to run hot. It also allows
Lightroom to use the GPU for additional processing.
As to the external drives, these are all USB. None of my computers
have the USB-C interface, so I'm port-speed limited. However, with the
exception of the Samsung T5, what I've found is that the R/W buffers
fill up after 20 seconds of use, so the drives are going to end up
running near the limit anyway.
As to the "Preview Settings", these "Retina" and equivalent displays
have a higher pixel density than what our eyes are able to see. the
standard settings will create a preview file based on the dpi of the
computer's primary display. You can dumb those settings down and it
will greatly improve performance with no apparent loss of detail as
once you zoom in, it creates a 100% view regardless of what the
preview settings are.
One final note on external hard drives. One of my faults is maximizing
my assets. If I buy an external hard drive, I'm going to use it until
the magic smoke has escaped. However, it really is best to retire them
out after a couple years of hard use. I discovered this with my
Seagate as it performed well, until it didn't. I did everything to
breathe new life into it, but it's time to retire it. Fortunately, for
me, as I'm shooting around 25,000 pictures a year, it doesn't take
long to exhaust a drive anyway, so the 2TB drives have all been taken
out of primary use as my library is at 3TB now. The 2TB WD drive is
still fine, and as it's my fastest spinny drive, I'll probably use it
as a travel backup drive. On a trip, I can take it and the SSD and
keep the 5TB at home.
In another post, we can discuss which methods of
partitioning/formatting the drives are best in a mixed PC/Mac
environment.
AG Schnozz
AG Schnozz
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|