Speeding up Your Computer

In today's blindingly fast computers with the burning hot CPU and astronomical amount of RAM, the slowest part of your computer is the hard drive. Modern hard drives are fast but they are from 50 times to 500 times slower than your RAM.

Lightroom is extremely disk intensive. Although most of its catalog is loaded in RAM, the photos, the cache, and the previews are not loaded in RAM but are read from your hard drive.

So what can we do to speedup the hard drive? It's simple:

• Clean
• Scrub
• Reorganize

There are 2 ways to read the Lightroom data from the hard drive:

1. Sequential reads, meaning that the Lightroom data is in a contiguous, meaning that the data files are in one single block.
2. Random reads, meaning that the Lightroom data is all over and spread around your hard drive.

Sequential reads are from 50% to 300% faster than random reads. The actual speed improvement will depend on the type of hard drive: Sata vs. IDE and the size of the onboard hard drive cache, but you can expect a computer's speed improvement from 25% to 75%.

Windows

• Run disk cleanup from: Start | Programs | Accessories | System tools | Disk Cleanup. You need to have at least 15% free disk space on your hard drive. The 15% free disk space applies to your "system" hard drive, the one where Windows run from. It doesn't apply to the USB/firewire external drives, these drive should have at least 10% free disk space. Windows does not work properly when it does not have enough free disk space and will have "random crashes" if your computer has less than 15% of free disk space.

• Run disk defragmenter from: Start | Programs | Accessories | System tools | Disk Defragmenter. You should run the defragmentation multiple times until there is no more improvement.

Microsoft has published the detailed steps: 5 ways to speed up your PC

OSX

I am NOT a Mac expert, I am a Windows expert. So verify my Mac info with your Mac "computer guy."

The Mac "so-called expert" will tell you that on a Mac, you don't need to defragment your hard drive, you do. A properly defragmented hard drive will make your computer run between 25% to 75% faster! This does not conflict with what I said earlier: "Sequential reads are from 50% to 300% faster than random reads" these are just reads, writes are a completely different beat, that why your computer will run between 25% and 75% faster.

Quote from Apple:

The file system used on Macintosh computers is designed to work with a certain degree of fragmentation. This is normal and does not significantly affect performance for the majority of users. You should not need to frequently defragment the computer's hard disk.

In reality, however, the nature of the files, the nature of the work you are doing, the nature of random-access disk mechanisms, and the exact order in which the files are segmented can all have a bearing on the resulting performance. In general, there is not significant degradation of performance from normal use of your computer.

If you create and delete a large number of files, your hard disk may become fragmented to the point that you may see a slight slow-down of file system performance.

-- Apple statement on defragmentation

This is just BS, Apple knows and is writing this statement to cover its ass with legaleze, see the 3rd paragraph.

Apple, as far as I know, does not provide the equivalent to Microsoft's Disk Cleanup and Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter, but there are many 3rd party software that will do that. You can search for them at:

• Mac Update
• Version Tracker

You first must run the disk cleanup, to free some disk space and then run the disk defragmenter. You should run the defragmentation multiple times until there is no more improvement.

All of the background information mentioned in the Windows section, also apply to OSX.

Beau A.C. Harbin
What are your thoughts on running LR from a USB 2 external drive? My main internal drive for photos contains LR and images but the drive is starting to fill up. I can move LR to an empty USB HDD but am worried about performance. Thanks.

Syv Ritch
It will be lousy. This has nothing to do with Lightroom but with the USB protocol. Today's hard drive run at 3Gb/sec or 3000Mb/sec, the USB hard drive run at 480Mb/sec or 6.25 times slower.

Alternative 1:
Move all the actual photos to the external USB drive, but keep Lightroom, it's catalogs, caches and previews on your local hard drive. Make sure than when you import your photos, you make it at 1:1 previews. It will run just as fast, since LR only fetch one photo at a time.

Alternative 2:
If your computer is recent enough, you will have an eSATA plug(red) at the back, then you can use an eSATA external drive. It will run as fast as an internal hard drive.

If you need to move a large number of photos, don't do it in Lightroom. It will take weeks. The quickest (not the simplest) is to do:

1. Close Lightroom
2. Move all your photos
3. Open Lightroom
4. Pick a photo, select the new location and Lightroom will update the drive for all the photos in that directory. You will need to do this each directory.

Beau A.C. Harbin
Syv

This is really helpful information. Thank you very much for taking the time.

I had thought I needed all my images on my large internal drive. Now I think I can make this all run faster by moving them off to my external drives and give LR just this drive. Should give it a lot of room.

Much appreciated.