speeding up LR3

[jchin]

Can someone make some recommendations on speeding up LR3?

I have a Lenovo W701 laptop with 12GB of RAM running Windows 7 x64.
The current hard drive is a regular 320GB HD.
The system can take a 2nd HD. I was wondering if installing a Seagate Momentus XT (hybrid) 500GB HD as a 2nd drive to hold the RAW files would help or not?

At present, I don't want to replace the original drive because it is still under warranty and don't have the software to clone the drive to a new drive (can anyone recommend one).

I do move photos (RAW files) offline to an external drive when I am not editing them, so 500GB should be more than enough for now.

All suggestions greatly appreciated.

[Richard]

What makes you think that the disk drive is a performance bottleneck? I'm not saying it's not, but I'd be curious to know whether you have any evidence. I would look to see whether you are paging or the CPU is maxed out. If you do have a disk bottleneck, adding an SSD might be more effective than simply replacing the existing drive.

[jchin]

Task manager does not show me using more than 8GB of RAM and the pagefile seems to be unused. So my guess that the HD spinning like made when rendering preview images, a faster HD would would speed things up. Now I cannot really afford a full SSD, not at the 500GB capacity anyway.

[Richard]

You wouldn't need to completely replace your hard drive with SSD, just set things up so that the stuff you are using the most is on it.

[jchin]

That is what I am thinking of doing. So if I setup my 2nd HD (most likely a Seagate hybrid drive) and put all my RAW images (maybe even the LR catalog) there, would that be enough? Or are there other things I need to change? If so, how? Thanks.

[MileHighAko]

I installed and SSD into my laptop and it was the greatest improvement I've ever seen, hardware wise.

There is another setting you can try to make LR3 appear to run faster for you. What I've found is that rendering the 1:1 preview is what slows me down the most. So I've started to sacrifice hard disk space and import time for a better experience. In your Import module, the first pane (file handling I think) you can select what preview you want to generate when importing. I set mine to 1:1. It takes more time and disk, but working with the files is much faster on my laptop, and I only keep the previews for a week so the space issue isn't that much of an issue. :)

Good luck.

[rdalland]

and I only keep the previews for a week so the space issue isn't that much of an issue. :)

Good luck.

In Lightroom I doubled the default Camera Raw Cache Setting to 2.0 GB, and set the Discard 1:1 Previews setting to "After One Week". Sped things up a lot for me.

[racer]

That is what I am thinking of doing. So if I setup my 2nd HD (most likely a Seagate hybrid drive) and put all my RAW images (maybe even the LR catalog) there, would that be enough? Or are there other things I need to change? If so, how? Thanks.

I wouldnt use a hybrid for your second drive, instead go with a SSD with the fastest write speeds you can afford. I think inorder to see the speed boost, you would need to put the LR catalogs on this drive. It seems the slowest part of LR is the reading and writing of a bunch of image previews, so this should speed things up drastically.

The seagate hybrid is sort of like buying half a Ferrari combined with half a Ford Pinto :D, I am not sure of the logic behind it. If you need the extra storage space, use a external drive