# Main external HDD



## babuja (Mar 16, 2016)

Hi guys,

Planning to use a external Hdd as main source. Regarding speed writing/reading what should be the minimum and the best for optimal performance and no lagging?

Cheers all


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## clee01l (Mar 17, 2016)

Welcome to the forum.  I/O speeds a=will be your concern The Best I/O is going to be with an internally connected disk drive. (i.e. buss mounted). It does not need to be your Primary drive although this may not be possible if you are using a Laptop.  For an external drive, It should have a separate power supply and port mounted.  The fastest to the slowest choices are Thunderbolt2, Thunderbolt, USB3, eSata, Firewire800, Firewire400, USB2. Note: the order is from memory so eSata and USB3 might truly be switched. 

You will want a drive with considerable caching 32Mb or better and you want on with a spin rate of 7200rpm (if this is a conventional drive and not SSD)


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 17, 2016)

It also makes some significant difference if the EHD is going to be only an image repository, or also will contain the lightroom catalog (and so implicitly preview cache).   If you keep the catalog on an internal, faster drive, you can reduce the need a bit for very fast EHD, and in my opinion also reduce the likelihood of catalog corruption. One issue with external drives is that "something" can always occur which can disconnect the drive at inappropriate times, a cable coming lose, someone unplugging the (if separate) power supply, an unrelated device on the same USB hub that goes nuts and hangs the bus, etc.   If these occur with (only) the images on the external drive usually not much bad happens, you might have to check that the last couple images got imported.  If it happens with the catalog there, you can get corruption which is a pretty big deal to fix unless you have very recent backups.n  And happen to notice when it happens, which sometimes one does not.

Catalogs are typically a very small fraction the size of your image store; their associated preview cache can get big, but you can also work to manage it (there are also techniques to move it to another drive as well, though not straightforward ones like a preference setting).


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## babuja (Mar 17, 2016)

Thanks guys. I'm thinking in Hdd seagate backup plus fast, 64Mb, 4Tb, and with writing speed around 200Mb/s.

I intend to store the catalog on my internal ssd and run lightroom on the ssd drive for better performance. Also keep a backup in a qnap 2 bay raid 1. Any suggestion/recommendation? Cheers


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## babuja (Mar 20, 2016)

Just continuing to search for information and read some reliability infos about HDD. Because of that I'll probably go for a touro desktop pro from Hitachi.


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## babuja (Mar 20, 2016)




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## Roelof Moorlag (Mar 20, 2016)

Some hard drive statistics: Hard Drive Reviews: Update on 2015 Hard Drive Reliability


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