|
Forums >
Photography Talk >
Lightroom, SSD's and Speed..
I have my OS(Windows 7) and LR 3 on an SSD (64 GB). My Raw files and Catalog are on an internal 1 TB HD. The ACR Cache is on the SSD. I am trying to optimize the speed of developing pictures (mostly wanting to browse through recently imported pics, and zoom in to check sharpness at a quick speed). It presently takes me 3-4 seconds to go and completely load from one image to the next. I am wondering if I could bring that down to 1 or 2 seconds? (I know, maybe I am being demanding - especially since it took my last computer a full 30 seconds to complete). As I understand it (and honestly I do not understand very much as I am just beginning to learn about computers), SSD's do not write very fast and LR reads and writes a lot. I am wondering if moving my Cache and/or Catalog would benefit the speed of browsing though images and zooming? I read somewhere that OS and LR should be on SSD, while the Cache should be on a separate SSD (but I am kind of thinking either a REALLY fast write/read SSD or regular super fast HD) while the Catalog and Raw files should be on a regular, separate HD... This way, they do not interfere when trying to write/read. But I also read that the Catalog should be on the SSD along with the previews... I don't know! I have been reading so much I am completely confused! Hopefully the knowledgeable and friendly MM community can guide me! Thanks. P.S.... my other concern is that writing repeatedly on an SSD can damage it or impair its performance over time... But then I read something about TRIM rectifying that? Oct 17 10 10:02 pm Link Moving as much as you can to the SSD will help performance. If you can, use the SSD (or get another one) for editing the files, and when you are ready to archive, move them on over to the spinning disk. Windows 7 has some nice tools built in for monitoring disk performance (resmon.exe, perfmon.exe) and there are many others out there that can help with figuring out where your bottleneck is at. TRIM basically sets the data as unwritable because it is essentially no longer usable. It doesn't prevent damage, it just gets around it. I believe there are around 10,000 read/writes available on SSD drives (so disable automatic defrag and minimize pagefile usage by having plenty of RAM). Oct 17 10 10:16 pm Link Internos Photography wrote: Wow... thanks. Oct 17 10 11:22 pm Link Moon Pix Photography wrote: The main thing to remember is to get SLC memory SSD drives and not MLC as SLC has much better longevity. Having a drive dedicated to LR would help, but probably not much. You really need to look into what exactly is causing the load delays and go from there. Some of the more recent drives get over 150MB/s so if you are working with a 20MB file, that should be loaded in under a second, but again, without specific metrics of your existing hardware and process, I can only speculate as to what you should do to improve the performance. Oct 18 10 12:06 am Link To do this I left the computer alone while I produce 100% previews of all photos and then check focus in Library mode, before moving to Develop (which is where I'm assuming you're spending your time since you say it takes 3-4 seconds? I could be wrong). You can only make the development process so quick regardless of where you put all your data. Apologies if I misunderstood something and you're already doing this. Oct 18 10 01:34 am Link Phil Drinkwater wrote: Hmmm... I will try and see if checking focus in Library speeds things up... Oct 18 10 08:57 am Link Internos Photography wrote: Really? SLC is better than MLC? More reliable? I was looking into this one; Oct 18 10 09:06 am Link This is from an Adobe Forum; http://forums.adobe.com/message/3018919 I want to add a word of warning to those who consider a SSD for Lightroom. I bought an Intel SSD based on reviews on Tomshardware. My system got a lot faster and it's amazing to see how quick programs start up. The performance is amazing and I'm running Windows 7 which natively supports SSDs. BUT the performance with Lightroom is very different though. Starting it up is faster, but once you start working you see very little to no difference. Why? Because Lightroom does not do much file reading from disk. The load time of a raw file from disk is not what slows Lightroom down. It's mostly processing it. Reading from the catalog file is faster yes so you will see some speed up going randomly through a very large library of photos. The big issue is that Lightroom writes a lot of files all the time. It writes thumbnails, it writes into the journal file, it merges the journal file into the catalog file, it writes previews in different sizes and it also writes to the ACR cache directory. And it does all that all over each time you adjust anything. All these little file write operations are a big issue for SSDs. They don't handle these well and it creates a large queue blocking the drive. The result is that Lightroom and the whole system freezes up for short moments (from a fractions of a second to several seconds). It took me a lot of time and online research to figure this out. It is a problem of all SSDs. Once I learned about it I moved my LR catalog to a normal HD (I have one SSD plus 3 normal HDs in my system). I moved the ACR cache directory to a different drive and last I moved my actual photos (raw files) to the third drive, basically elimiting the SSD completely. From that moment on Lightroom was A LOT faster and responsive, and most of all the frequent freeze ups are completely gone now! In that configuration Lightroom runs faster than from the SSD. Of course running other programs that write a lot of files make things worse and cause longer and more frequent freeze ups. I know a lot of people will not like to hear this, but trust me I didn't want to believe it either especially after I spent a lot of money on an Intel SSD and seeing the speed up of my system. But after finding more and more articles online about the typical freeze ups of systems running on SSDs and doing my own tests I can confirm it. Lightroom and SSD are not a good match. Having more than one HDD to distribute the file I/O activity of Lightroom across them will speed things up much better than a SSD. Thoughts? Oct 18 10 02:54 pm Link o.k... I have hijacked my own thread, but I have found a way to zoom in on an image in LR with no lag whatsoever... http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/ … htroo.html By rendering 1:1 previews during or after import! YES! Still wondering how others feel about all the other topics discussed (mostly by myself) in this thread.  Oct 18 10 04:23 pm Link |
