external HDD quesiton for picture editing

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bevo

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I just got the wife a new camera, and am wanting to buy adobe lightroom. She has a macbook with a 120 gig SSD. I'm wanting to get her an external HDD to put RAW picture files on. I'm not sure how it will work though because I have never used an external for anything.

Is this how it works? You boot up lightroom and somehow set it so that it's default drive to save to is the external and then any pictures imported will be saved to the external, and anytime you open lightroom any time the external is plugged in it will automatically search for the pictures off the external.

Another question. Will it still use the SSD drive to do the editing with so that you get the SSD speed and then when you finish and save it will save back to the external?

I really have no idea how to setup an external, but I'm guessing it's pretty much the same as using a second drive in a PC.

I haven't bought the external yet so any suggestions on an external would be great because I ahve no idea what a decent would be. i would like something that is fairly fast to write to, and would be great if it doesn't need a seperate power supply, so that it is more mobile and can be taken anywhere.

Any advice anyone has about setting up an exteranl for editing, and what brands or even an exact model to buy would be great. My wife is not that great with computers, so the most simple to use solution would be great.
 
Get a USB 3.0(it is backwards compatible with USB 2.0) one and just plug it in and wait a few seconds for the macs drivers to install and done the drive will be found in the system.

You will need to format it to HFS+
 
Grayfox
Get a USB 3.0(it is backwards compatible with USB 2.0) one and just plug it in and wait a few seconds for the macs drivers to install and done the drive will be found in the system.

You will need to format it to HFS+
Click to expand...

I know how to get it to work, what I'm wondering is will it work like I'm wanting to, as I mentioned above.

Our mac also uses thunderbolt instead of USB 3.0. Would I be able to get a USB to thunderbolt cable and benefit from thunderbolt?
 
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It is plug and play.

As soon as the drive is formatted to either FAT(so it works with PC, Mac and Linux) or HFS+ it will come up as a drive so you can put all your files on it.

Then it is a matter of telling the program where you want to keep the working files.

The best drive i would recommend is WD Elements Portable.
 
Would that drive take advantage of thunderbolt ?

Would this be what I'm looking for? http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008D4X9UI/?tag=gtplanet-20

Her macbook doesn't have USB 3.0 but it does have thunderbolt. Would using thunderbolt instead of the USB 2.0 have much better transfer rates? It seems like thunderbolt is as fast as it gets, but I don't know if the speed of the read and write speeds of an HDD would benefit from it.
 
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Grayfox
USB 3.0 drives can still work on USB 2.0 computers.

Not seen a 2.5" thunderbolt drive.
Click to expand...

That's why i was asking about the one I linked. Is says it's USB 3.0 or thunderbolt.
 
What I'm trying to find out is would the thunderbolt help compared to USB 2.0 or not? That's why the other drive costs more. I don't want a 3000$ laptop slowed down by USB 2.0 transfer rates while trying to edit pictures. I really don't care about price or I wouldn't have a Mac. I'm wanting to get the best performance I can for editing.

Or does it make no difference what you use thunderbolt or USB 2.0 because of the speed of an hdd?

It seems like if the thunderbolt works you would be better of with Mac by removing any internal sata II hdd or SSD and buying an external SSD and use thunderbolt. All Mac boards support are sata II anyway. Doesn't thunderbolt have up to 10gb transfer rates?
 
20MiB/s is not really slow when it comes to picture editing.

Plus a hard drive is where you save the work.

Any work that is done during editing is saved in RAM.
 
When loading/saving individual images I doubt you'd actually see any difference between USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. You're talking a tenth of a second for a 50 megabyte image vs. five hundredths of a second; they're both in the "quicker than an eyeblink" range. USB 2.0 would be about a second. Given that, I'm not sure it's worth paying twice as much for a Thunderbolt as for a USB 3.0 drive. But if cost is truly no object, yeah, you'll see a difference when copying a couple hundred images at once.

As for the details of how to point Adobe to the external drive, I'm afraid I can't help you much. The last Mac I touched had a slot for a floppy disc right under the screen. I know it's not really an issue on either a Windows or linux machine.
 
Thanks guys. I guess she will only be editing one at a time anyway and really it wouldn't help speed up the transfer from camera to hdd any since the cameras are only 2.0.
 

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