Advice required regarding use of SSD for intensive photo processing

[roghun]

I'm just a short step away from deciding the final spec I'll be ordering from PCS. However, there's still a few niggly things eating away at me.

I use Lightroom and Photoshop a lot for photo editing; sometimes singly and other times I export back and forth between the two. I currently have approx 1 Tb of stored images (mixture of RAW and Jpeg) on my current PC (yes, I will be deleting a lot of them before I migrate to a new PC ).

After a typical days wildlife shoot, I would upload anything between 1Gb to 10Gb worth of images ready for deletion or editing.

My concerns are around SSDs.

I keep reading that SSDs have a shorter lifespan than HDDs. In some instances I've read that some can last as little as 3 years and that the number of writes/rewrites over time will eventually cause an SSD to fail.

It was my intention to have the operating system (Windows 10) installed on the SSD along with programs (including Lightroom and Photoshop). All of my photo libraries and documents would be stored on the HDD.

It has been recommended by some that the Lightroom Catalogue should also be installed on the SSD. This is where I'm slightly concerned, because when editing images in Lightroom I'm sure this is where there will be a considerable number of writes for every image I edit. If that's true, then surely it's going to wear out my SSD far earlier than it would if I had the catalogue on the HDD?

As things stand, my PC spec caters for a 256Gb SSD (for OS and programs) and a 2Tb HDD.

Any advice on how I should organise my stuff across the SSD and HDD would be welcome, especially from anyone currently doing a lot of photo processing . . . . . I basically need some confidence that an SSD isn't going to fail me any time soon, thereby losing my OS and programs.

Hope that makes sense!

 

[ubuysa]

The number of writes to modern SSDs is no longer an issue, an SSD can be expected to have a lifespan equivalent to an HDD these days.

Ideally, and budget allowing, your best option would be a fast M.2 NVMe SDS for Windows and programs, a SATA or M.2 ACHI SSD as the workspace for your photo editing and a large capacity 7200rpm SATA HDD for general data and photo archive.

Don't worry about the number of SSD writes. [emoji3]
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[roghun]

The number of writes to modern SSDs is no longer an issue, an SSD can be expected to have a lifespan equivalent to an HDD these days.

Ideally, and budget allowing, your best option would be a fast M.2 NVMe SDS for Windows and programs, a SATA or M.2 ACHI SSD as the workspace for your photo editing and a large capacity 7200rpm SATA HDD for general data and photo archive.

Don't worry about the number of SSD writes. [emoji3]
Sent using Tapatalk

Thanks for your quick reply!

I'm not sure what you mean by 'workspace for photo editing' . . . . does that mean the Lightroom Catalogue should be on a different SSD to the Lightroom Program and also separate from my folders of images on the HDD?

Also, which of these would be better . . . . . an Intel i7-9700 Eight Core 3.0GHz or an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Six Core?

Many thanks

 

[ubuysa]

Thanks for your quick reply!

I'm not sure what you mean by 'workspace for photo editing' . . . . does that mean the Lightroom Catalogue should be on a different SSD to the Lightroom Program and also separate from my folders of images on the HDD?

I'm not a Lightroom user but if the catalogue is a very active file(s) then a separate drive for it will offer much better performance than trying to put both Windows and the catalogue on the same drive. You'll also find (probably) that the drive for the catalogue does not need to be as fast as the drive for Windows and programs so can be a cheaper drive.

The Lightroom program itself should be on the same drive as Windows.

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[roghun]

I'm not a Lightroom user but if the catalogue is a very active file(s) then a separate drive for it will offer much better performance than trying to put both Windows and the catalogue on the same drive. You'll also find (probably) that the drive for the catalogue does not need to be as fast as the drive for Windows and programs so can be a cheaper drive.

The Lightroom program itself should be on the same drive as Windows.

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The Lightroom Program and the Lightroom catalogue interact intensively during editing. However, I'm now thinking that I may just be able to get away with just having the Lightroom executable on the SSD and the Lightroom catalogue on the 7200rpm HDD, rather than having another additional SSD. I'll have 32 Gb DDR4 RAM as well as a 4Gb NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1650 and so I'm thinking that will be hugely better than what I currently have.

Do you have any thoughts on the other question I asked . . . . .
which of these would be better . . . . . an Intel i7-9700 Eight Core 3.0GHz or an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Six Core?

Many thanks

 

[ubuysa]

The Lightroom Program and the Lightroom catalogue interact intensively during editing. However, I'm now thinking that I may just be able to get away with just having the Lightroom executable on the SSD and the Lightroom catalogue on the 7200rpm HDD, rather than having another additional SSD. I'll have 32 Gb DDR4 RAM as well as a 4Gb NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1650 and so I'm thinking that will be hugely better than what I currently have.

Do you have any thoughts on the other question I asked . . . . .
which of these would be better . . . . . an Intel i7-9700 Eight Core 3.0GHz or an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Six Core?

Many thanks

I'll let others with more experience with CPUs answer that question. [emoji3]

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[Oussebon]

Asking for advice on CPU A vs CPU B is not usually going to give helpful answers, especially when they're on totally different platforms.

Probably easiest if you state the budget for the system, exactly what you require, and then people can suggest the best bang for buck options

You are almost guaranteed to want your lightroom catalogue on SSD. The amount of data you're talking about writing to the SSD is trivial versus what SSDs can actually endure. They can handle a lot more. A lot.