Drive speed

[Ian Watson]

How fast is fast enough?

Every nerd just thought, "Too fast is not fast enough!" 

I have no immediate need for an external drive as the primary home of my photographs. However, the topic has been on my mind lately and I am curious. Solid state drives offer plenty of speed but capacity can be expensive. Hard drives offer plenty of capacity at low cost but tend to be used in RAID to boost speed.

For editing still photographs with Lightroom and Photoshop, how fast is practicable? At what point do other bottlenecks get in the way of faster drives?

[Steven Paulsen]

Over the winter I put together a small, fast rig for post and storage. I bought a Dell 3430/i7,8700/32gb/4gb, gpu with 3 M.2 drives, a ss, 2.5" and a questionable 3.5" 4tb, spinner,

Try an M.2, NVMe solid state drive and get a 10gps enclosure, ($20.) If your present pc has USB.3.0 and even an internal SSD, the external rig is almost identical fast. Matched with a machine with USB 3.1 and later, transfer speed makes my head swim. Two to six gigs per second, I found a new toy.

Beware, the drive market is bottoming out. Dont get fooled because there is a HUGE difference in drive longevity with Total Bytes Written. A high quality 2tb revision 3, or4 drive is around $100, now.

And dont forget..............have fun.

[Birna Rørslett]

For image [long-term] storage and retrieval: any connection or device providing gigabit speed (in practice > 100MB/s) will do more than well enough. Thus storage to an external drive or NAS is all right.

For image processing: a local drive of the fastest kind supported by your machine. You ideally want the image to load at a blink of an eye

[Ian Watson]

Thank you, Steven. After my recent attempt to upgrade the SSD in my iMac, I will leave building computers to those with actual talent 

There is a decent selection of portable NVMe drives, so there is no need to roll my own. I use one for my off-site backup and it is indeed swift. My curiosity was more to do with how fast one needs rather than can achieve. A bit like how fast can one drive when commuting.

Fun will never be forgotten!

[Ian Watson]

Thank you, Birna! That is exactly what I wanted to know.

[Steven Paulsen]

Ian, Question;
Doesn't your iMac have Thunderbolt? The whole concept of USB C and accessories, docks, 40gps transfer is well thought out and interesting.


But in the end, I can ask the same question. How fast is fast enough?

[Ian Watson]

Yes, two Thunderbolt 3 ports.

I agree about the concept and ecosystem. My curiosity came from all the marketing lines touting high speeds, especially when prefaced with the phrase "up to." One can drive a coach and horses through that one.

For now I am very happy with everything on my new 2 TB internal SSD, backed up every night to a much slower external drive. Then there is a portable SSD drive that lives in my locker at work and comes home to be updated every couple of weeks or so. When the time comes to buy a new computer, though, I am inclined to buy external drives (not forgetting backup!) rather than pay what Apple wants for internal storage.

Single and twin hard drives seem to be disappearing from the market, so the choice might be moot by the time I need more external storage. I certainly don't have enough data to justify a 4-bay RAID.

[Steven Paulsen]

Ian,
What type HD does your iMac use? 2.5", 3.5" or M.2?
I think the new standard for higher end computing machines will be, or already are, M.2 drives. I am guessing consumer grade computers will use standard 2.5/3.5" hard drives for some time to come.


Curiosity alone led me to buy a 256gb, NVMe drive to fill an empty slot on my dell precision. After seeing how much faster, compared to a 6gbs, 2.5", I bought a pci card that houses two m.2 drives. (One NVMe and one Sata, both 2tb, plus a 1tb NVMe boot drive, on the logic board. I have 10tb's worth of storage in a sff precision 3430 and they are all half full.


The bare truth, speed wise......., I get used to whatever, and how much faster becomes normal. Using a spinner, boot drive is now quite painful. I have been using two older quad, i7 notebooks with standard 2.5" ssd drives, but they do not have the security hardware needed for windoze 11.


Which is best for long term backup/photo storage. M.2 or 2.5" ssd or an archival grade DVD? Or do I use an old school platter drive and risk the thought of dropping it, and lose everything?
It never ends.


Looking back my 1st mac. It had a 68040LC processor (which did not have floating point calculations,) a whopping 350mb hard drive and had 4 or 8 mb of memory. I have a receipt for a 16mb simm for $400. A couple PS filters made the LC crash and Sears at the time took it back and I got an early 75mhz power pc. At the time I was hoofing eyeglasses @Sears, 30 some years ago.
Thank you. Your iMac brought back some laughs.

[Ian Watson]

Steven,

It has M.2. The original 0.5 TB one (by Samsung) was getting full and I decided that swapping if for a larger one would keep my backup strategy simpler.

In case anyone else still has an iMac that can be upgraded and is thinking of swapping the M.2 drive, a standard 2280 will not fit because the notch on the connector is unique to Apple. As far as I can tell, only OWC has a suitable replacement. Better yet, just buy some external storage and save yourself a few headaches. (I recently discovered that I did not reconnect the internal microphone properly. That is on top of the cracked screen  )

For long-term storage, it depends. If not connected to power then the old-school spinning platter might be more tolerant of sitting on a shelf. SSDs need power once in a blue moon or might become corrupted. Then again, it is probably a good idea to give any drive a bit of exercise once in a while. So DVDs might still have a place.

My plan is to have an on-site backup, an off-site backup and try to keep up with changing technology.

Nearly 40 years ago, I remember playing with a BBC Micro model B. 32 KB of memory and a tape player for loading programs.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be