Lightroom catalog location

Question

I have about 2TB of RAW photos (~100 000) and following hard disks: 1) 1TB 7200rpm 2) 2x2TB (mirror) 7200rpm 3) 2TB 5400-7200rpm

I would like to optimize hard drive workload, so where best place for Lightroom catalog and temp. Currently configuration:

1) System and RAW cache
2) Photos itself (all in RAW)
3) nothing

There is three options I'm thinking about, that's first:

1) System and RAW cache
2) Photos
3) Catalog

second:

1) System
2) Photos and catalog
3) RAW cache

third:

1) System anв RAW cache
2) Photos
3) Catalog

Or may be you have better suggestion?

Answer 1

Since 3 of your drives are 2 TB, have you considered using RAID 5 instead? You would get a boost both in performance and reliability.

It would also probably work if you made the (2) into a RAID 0 for speed and the (3) as a backup drive. In this case you would have to sync (3) - maybe nightly or weekly - as a regular job but would get very good performance.

In either case, I would place the catalog on (1) to avoid seek back-and-forth between images and the catalog itself.

Answer 2

I'd leave the RAW files and catalog on the second drive for the redundancy. As far as the other stuff, I'm not sure what you mean by 5400-7200rpm on the third drive, but if it is a 5400rpm drive, I'd probably leave both system and cache on the first. Ideally, you really want a small SSD for cache, but using a 5400rpm drive for anything is probably going to be more penalty than the extra seek time from the occasional system lookup on the main drive.

Think of it this way, on the main drive you will occasionally have to wait for the system to look something up before looking up your cache, but on the 5400rpm drive, you'll be waiting extra time on EVERY lookup because of the third slower drive.

Answer 3

You can leave the catalog on a different drive than your photos. If the photos are on a drive that is disconnected then you will only have access to the previews and if you enabled smart previews then you can do some editing on those photos. You only need 1 catalog for all your images, regardless of which drives they are located on.

Answer 4

just looked at the Avarage Disk Queue perfomance counter during image import/sync and preview buit. So if I put catalog on second drive it will be overloaded while third drive containing cache almost all the time did nothing.

So I decided to leave System drive just for system and put catalog on third drive as well as cache, photos remain on second. May be it's sound strange but there is more workload on disk with photos itself during reading and then CPU load to built preview, because RAW file around 40-50 MB each and preview less then 10.

And as third drive have 32 MB cache (may be even 64? don't rememeber) and photo previews built one by one, it's not big deal to write it to the drive once ready. For sure having SSD for system and catalog is better solution, I have such in my leption, but that is sister's PC and I'm not planning to upgrade it soon.

Regarding RAID - it's pain if you would like to reorganize it and especially if that's hardware raid, you will depend on controller (built into motherboard or PCI-Express) so I'm scared to create RAID5 (easier to manage data, but slower write speed) or RAID0 (I've recently lost my temp drive wich used RAID0, not big deal but anyway I was not happy to spend another few days on reorganizing data)

For anyone who are planning to have some redundancy I found almost perfect solution: WD MyBook with USB 3.0 and 1Gb Ethernet connection and have one disk up to 4TB. As for better redundancy you should have data in two separaty physical locations (it's better then have just mirrored drive on one PC) so Ideally I would by two of them and install at my home and sister/mother home, then configure only photo sync and have catalog on my laptop on SSD (sister will have her own catalog as well locally on the PC). I'm not going with this way as I already spent money on internal hard drives and good external USB 3.0 box cost about 50$ which is half of 2TB drive price.