External HD or not?

[paintingwithlight]

Hello,

I have an iMac with 1 TB drive, about 4 years old. I was running out out HD space (about 10% free). I have just purchased a new iMac with a 2 TB fusion drive (new model, yet to arrive). A colleague of mine felt that I should keep my photos and videos on an external HD as this would improve the overall speed of my system. Can anyone comment? BTW I back up on two external drives that I alternate, storing them off-site.

Michael

[pnodrog]

An external drive will slow down transferring the photographs from either the camera or a card reader. I keep all my photographs on a separate internal drive/partition. If you arrange your disk space and correctly allocate a scratch disk area I very much doubt using an external bulk storage drive will assist in any way with the speed of your system. It will however slowdown the transfer of the photographs.

[billtils]

Michael, Paul is correct and your colleague is wrong. If the reason for the change was space you will have what you were after. However, the fusion drive option is not all that great in regards to speed, where SSD is the way to go. It adds to the price of course ...

Paul's advice would apply even if you had an SSD in the external enclosure. You say that the Imac is "new model" - do you mean the recently announced upgraded line with the Thunderbolt 3 ports? These do allow quite fast transfer rates but at a price.

[george013]

I don't know the Mac, but in Windows there's something as a indexing service. When this one is on, it slows down average speed. I've turned it off.
Once the program I use has opened and has build an index for itself, it's fast. Fast enough for me.

George

[Shadowman]

Hello,

I have an iMac with 1 TB drive, about 4 years old. I was running out out HD space (about 10% free). I have just purchased a new iMac with a 2 TB fusion drive (new model, yet to arrive). A colleague of mine felt that I should keep my photos and videos on an external HD as this would improve the overall speed of my system. Can anyone comment? BTW I back up on two external drives that I alternate, storing them off-site.

Michael

Michael,

There are always tradeoffs and personal preferences involved when you ask a question like yours. I use a PC and have several external hard drives attached and one internal drive with an enclosure that I'm using solely for backup. I have several friends who use Macs and they use external drives for personal reasons; one to keep personal images separate from work images. While external drives work for us, there have been several members on this forum who have had issues or were concerned about using external drives; I personally lost some images when one of my drives crashed; lesson learned as I now try to use several different backup methods. It will only cost you a few hundred dollars to experiment with an external drive so I would suggest trying it for yourself and just be aware of potential issues.

Seagate's Failure Rate a Cause for Concern.

[billtils]

Michael,

There are always tradeoffs and personal preferences involved when you ask a question like yours.

John, Indeed there are! However, the question in the OP was about increasing speed by keeping photos and video on an external drive and the answer to that is "No it won't". However, the OP also mentioned using 2 external drives for back up and that is sensible.

[Shadowman]

John, Indeed there are! However, the question in the OP was about increasing speed by keeping photos and video on an external drive and the answer to that is "No it won't". However, the OP also mentioned using 2 external drives for back up and that is sensible.

Hi Bill,

Most comments about speed related to transferring images to the drive not overall performance such as processing the images after transfer. If I'm not mistaken the OP was referring to system speed for daily usage.

[billtils]

Hi Bill,

Most comments about speed related to transferring images to the drive not overall performance such as processing the images after transfer. If I'm not mistaken the OP was referring to system speed for daily usage.

Hi John

Perhaps the OP could come back with more details! However, I have had direct experience of an SSD that began life in a USB3 external enclosure and then moved internally and there is no doubt at all that the image load speed and the processing speed were both faster after moving it inboard. That's a direct observation but I have been assured by two computer pros that it is what would be expected as the limiting factor is the communications interface.

[paintingwithlight]

Thanks for the feedback.

I back up daily to an external HD and archive all photos and video to a different (pair of) external devices monthly.

To clarify my question - I was told that moving all my photos and videos to an external drive would speed up my computer (e.g., opening LR, opening mail, loading and watching videos, etc.). That seems incorrect to me unless I had less than 10% or 5% HD space free and swap space was becoming an issue. My OP was a sanity check to see if I was missing something.

Michael

[John 2]

Just out of interest and since you are an iMac user, I came across this tonight.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...tos-video.html

I was told that moving all my photos and videos to an external drive would speed up my computer (e.g., opening LR, opening mail, loading and watching videos, etc.). That seems incorrect to me unless I had less than 10% or 5% HD space free and swap space was becoming an issue.

I think this statement might be correct if you are using your system drive (C Drive) to store your images. Otherwise as has been said already, an additional internal HD will not only be faster but frankly, is the least expensive option if you have the necessary drive bays and SATA ports available.