I currently have all my RAW photos on a 3.5” external USB drive connected to my NAS. It’s only connected to the NAS so that I can see the photo drive on my home network. Why not just use the NAS, you say? Well, I just went through all the scattered photo folders on the NAS and consolidated all my and my wife’s photos onto one 4TB USB drive. And it’s this drive I use with DxO. However, I think the 3.5” drive is a bit slow, or maybe it’s that it’s connected as an external drive to the NAS.
I also have a mirror of that drive for backup purposes on a 2.5” USB drive. Would that drive be a little faster to access? Or is the NAS adding latency?
I also have a Linux box on the network as well. Would connecting the USB drives to that PC offer better performance than going through the NAS?
I ask because I want to turn down the NAS. It’s been up and running for 10 years and it needs a rest. Since I made a complete backup of it, I don’t need it up. And the backup was made on exFAT drives, not the proprietary format the NAS does backups in.
I then scoured all the photo folders on the NAS backup and created yet another 2TB ‘just photos’ drive to use with LRC (now cancelled) and DxO.
Really all I want to know is if the 3.5” HDD is slower than its 2.5” mirror. And when I say ‘mirror’, I’m not talking RAID – I just made a dupe of the larger drive to a smaller 2.5” drive.
I know I rambled, so sorry. I just want to get that drive off the NAS as the NAS is just a gateway to the USB drive.
If media access speed for editing is your goal, photo files should be stored according to the following prioritised list (1= highest priority)
Files on internal SSD + sharing
Files on external SSD directly attached to the computer + sharing
Files on (NAS) internal drive
Files on (NAS) external drive
etc.
(NAS) can also refer to the following: Some routers provide sharing through one of the USB ports. I used this for a while for music streaming…until the provider pulled the sharing feature from its routers. Using the router provides the smallest eco-footprint … and if you separate editing from viewing, speed should be good enough too.
There is no way for us to know if your 2.5” drive is faster or slower than your 3.5” drive, as you have not told us what drives you use. Physical size does not matter here. I’s all about technique, as they say. (or specs)
I was under the wrong impression that 2.5” drives are actually slower than full-size 3.5” drives, even at 5400 RPM. Before seeing your answer, AI suggested that I connect a USB SSD directly to my Mac and copy over the files I want to work on from the 4TB network drive. When done, simply copy the files back to the network drive. So, your #2 is what I’ve implemented. Not that my original setup was performing badly, but the new arrangement is definitely an improvement.
Yeah, I have a Toshiba 2.5” 2TB external drive and a Western Digital Red 3.5” 4TB external USB drive attached to the NAS. A small 512GB SSD attached to the Mac made a big difference. What I didn’t mention is that the 4TB is always connected – the 2.5” was just a spare (a 2nd backup), but I thought it might be faster and I would swap them. It’s not. See my reply to platypus.
I don’t understand why you have your external drive plugged into a NAS (unless I missed it.) Why don’t you have the external drive plugged directly into the computer you edit photos on? That is the best way.
@platypus was correct. Since my wife also has photos to upload from her MacBook, I needed to have an external photo drive available on the network. Connecting it to the NAS was the simplest way to make the drive available.
On my Mac, I have an external 512GB SSD for working with my photos. It’s a copy of what’s on the NAS-connected drive. When my wife is all done uploading our vacation snaps, I’ll sync all the drives and have 3 copies (there’s a third USB HDD as a copy as well) of the files.