INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL DRIVES AND LIGHTROOM

There has been a lot of confusion over the concept of an external drive and Lightroom. Most people do not have enormous internal hard drives and if you choose to build high res previews, the Lightroom Catalog can grow quite large. Mine is currently 138.62 GB which breaks down to :
Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata 137.91 GB
Lightroom Catalog. lrcat 687.8 mg

In addition I have all of my raw files which total over 500 GB.


So the Lightroom application lives on the main drive and the Lightroom Catalog and raw files live on an external one terabyte drive.


Ideally, you would want everything internally on the main drive but most folks don't have that kind of storage. I just put together the ideal Lightroom system. Fo all who might be interested, here goes:

I have a Quad Core Mac with 16 gigs of Ram and 30 inch Cinema Display. I now have the 30 and the 23 running on this which is fantastic. Internally I put in 4 Hitachi one terabyte sata drives. One drive holds my Lightroom Library and one is an internally backup and the other two are storage. Externally I have two one terabyte drives for extra space. I have Drobo with two 750 Seagates and two one terabyte drives inside. The Drobo is simply fantastic In my opinion, it is superior to RAID. Hardware and software based, you add SETA drives giving you unlimited storage capacity while fully protecting all the data in an automated and seamless manner. I am going to use two Drobo's for complete archiving.

Now more on the Drobo:
As you guys know, I am always on the prowl for storage and haven't real found anything that has completely satisfied my insatiable appetite for space. About a year ago I met with a few guys that had what seemed like a brilliant idea but like many brilliant ideas they didn't quite have a product. Well, all that has changed. They came through have a growing staff and most importantly have a brilliant product. The product is called Drobo and it has answered my prayers about storage. In my opinion, it is superior to RAID. Hardware and software based, you add SETA drives giving you unlimited storage capacity while fully protecting all the data in an automated and seamless manner. Best of all it is reliable and inexpensive for what it offers. I just installed a Drobo with two 750 gb drives and two one terabyte drives and I couldn't be happier. Check out drobo.com.


Have fun.

seth