Originally Posted by Pupator Mine is not running "snail slow," but it is slower than LR3 was. I've tried rearranging my catalog and files to see of that helps. I now have: 1) LR installed on my primary drive (internal SSD) 2) LR catalog saved to external ssd (via USB 3) 3) Photo files saved to internal storage drive (7200rpm)

That's sorta like mine except the in-work photos are on the same (internal) SSD as the LR catalog. Like you, LR is installed on a separate SSD.

Do you find having the photos on a separate drive from the LR catalog beneficial?

The SSDs are much faster than my data drive which I suspect was hindering performance.

Originally Posted by Blackwood Do you find having the photos on a separate drive from the LR catalog beneficial? The SSDs are much faster than my data drive which I suspect was hindering performance.

No. I think it's a hindrance to have the photos on a standard hard drive rather than an SSD. But, prices being what they are, I'm not able to shell out for an SSD large enough for my photos yet.

My primary SSD is 120 (45 free currently). My Photos/Videos drive (non SSD) is 2 TB and my external SSD is 120GB. I may try moving my most accessed photos (say, just 2012 pictures) to the external SSD and see if that gives an advantage over the HDD.

I have a 2 TB external drive that is virtually full. And a new 4TB drive that is about half full mostly from this year alone. My laptop 500GB drive is really full. Just to keep my working catalogs on. SSD is not in my imidiate future due to size.

I have had an interesting update though. I have been trying to use the LR smugmug plugin. I think it is quite a bit faster. When I was trying what I thought was this uploader out of the LR publish services I think it was just a version of jefferies uploader. It is sort of confusing which you are using. It takes a bit of fiddling with but you can do a lot with it. And the sync function seems to work very well to update photos. It doesn't have a timer on the status bar. So I need to time it to see how fast it can load up 100 or so images. I am guessing it will only be a few minutes.

So in the end, it could be jeffery's loader.

That's funny ZD - I just finally gave up on the Smugmug uploader and went back to Jeffery's. I haven't had any performance changes since disabling one and enabling the other.

I'll try the SM uploader again one day but it's not ready for prime-time. At least not with my catalog.

Right, it will be a while before we can use them for mass storage. But we use them in workflow. I don't store photos there. I import there, work them, and then offload to large spinning drives.

It's pretty much the same procedure I use when going from my MacBook to my Windows desktop.

I moved all my 2012 folders to the USB3 external SSD drive. I love how easy that is to do in Lightroom.

I'll report back with any speed increases.

Originally Posted by Pupator No. I think it's a hindrance to have the photos on a standard hard drive rather than an SSD. But, prices being what they are, I'm not able to shell out for an SSD large enough for my photos yet. My primary SSD is 120 (45 free currently). My Photos/Videos drive (non SSD) is 2 TB and my external SSD is 120GB. I may try moving my most accessed photos (say, just 2012 pictures) to the external SSD and see if that gives an advantage over the HDD.

Photos are accessed infrequently. And they are totally linear reads so a 2 TB 7200 RPM drive should be fine.

Having your catalog and previews on the SSD would make a big difference. So do that, and the spinning drive is fine for the RAW files themselves.

Originally Posted by CatOne Having your catalog and previews on the SSD would make a big difference. So do that, and the spinning drive is fine for the RAW files themselves.

And the swap/tmp space for PS.

I may yet buy a new Mac Pro, depending on what Apple announces next week. In the meantime however I've made a number of upgrades to my 2006 model, including swapping out the dual core Xeons for quad core ones and LR4 is now running nicely again.

Processor Upgrade

SSD, USB 3 upgrades

Charlie

LR4 was definitely running slower than 3 for me in develop. Apparently, the preferences file can get corrupted and cause this issue. (This comes from another forum where a guy chatted with Adobe support for a bit)

If you want to see if this is your problem too, do the following (Windows):
Hit Start, type "%appdata%" (no quotes) and press enter.
Open Adobe
Open Lightroom
Open Preferences
Rename "Lightroom 4 Preferences.agprefs" to something else (like "old lightroom 4 preferences.agprefs").

Start Lightroom (and make sure you choose your correct catalog). This probably killed a few of your settings, so you can redo those if you feel this sped things up. If you don't feel it's any faster, just repeat the steps above, deleting the new preferences file that Lightroom created and renaming the old one back.