09-08-2019, 04:22 AM
datbeme wrote:
I'm in a similar situation as you—while I'm not a full-time pro, I also spend a lot of time in PS and LR, and my storage needs and internal SSD are nearly identical. First of all, mattkime and jdc know their stuff, so I'd start with their recommendations.
But unless you are editing enormous quantities of RAW photos, you can probably get by with doing your short term work on the internal SSD and then offloading the bulk of your content onto any of a multitude of external 4TB drives. At that point, speed isn't terribly important since you are just offloading your files, and USB3 is plenty fast enough for any spinny drive and most SSDs. Just make sure you have at least one additional external in the loop to automatically do a clone backup of that external "media" drive as well as a Time Machine backup (and ideally) an additional clone backup of your internal SSD.
Really, for most mortals, TB2/TB3 doesn't really become important until you are utilizing a RAID or you need the daisy-chaining abilities that Thunderbolt provides. I have a TB2 RAID 5 system that I use for video, but I do all of my LR edits on my 512GB internal SSD before offloading the originals to a simple 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Drive (I think I got it at Costco) connected via USB3. I then do nightly CCC backups to a portable, bus-powered 4TB Seagate drive via USB3 and periodic backups to bare spinny drives via an OWC Voyager toaster connected via USB3.
Additional backups and clones are strongly encouraged, but for what you are asking about, this is where I would start. I'd rather go overboard on the number of backups than fret over the quality and speed of a particular drive. All can fail, and the speed of a single spinny drive is irrelevant compared to your internal SSD or an external SSD you connect via USB3 or greater.
That makes sense. What I'm thinking of doing is getting the 4TB WD My Book as the full-time connected external drive and backing it up regularly to the two 4TB portable drives I have. For photos I'm editing, I can put them onto the SanDisk Extreme External SSD I bought for use when I'm on location (it's a 500GB SSD.)
That's probably the easiest route to go for now.