Fusion Drive with Lightroom/Photoshop

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I am planning on getting the new 21.5" iMac but am stumped about this Fusion Drive. I see the benefits of being able to load Lightroom and Photoshop faster, but my question is this: If I store all of my image files on a standard USB external drive, am I losing the benefits of the fusion drive? I understand I would be better to have my images on an external SSD or Thunderbolt but that's not an option for me at this time (I shoot weddings and would fill up an external SSD in no time). Is my USB external drive going to be a huge bottleneck when editing images, transferring files etc?

Thanks!
 

bobtomay

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Accessing anything stored on an external USB drive will be slower than accessing it on the internal drive.
Whether you have a fusion drive or don't have a fusion drive.





(Moved thread here - and posting the same question in multiple places is not required nor desired.)
 
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My issue is that I fill a TB of data easily in a year. I am currently using a Macbook Pro and it has a 500 GB internal HD so that would be filled in no time. I also back up my first external HD to a second so that I always have 2 copies of my images...So keeping my images on the internal HD wouldn't really work (even the 3 TB internal offered on the iMacs would be filled within a couple of years)
 

bobtomay

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Same issue all of us face that use/store large amounts of data.

Surely you are already familiar with access times using USB (and I'm "assuming" USB 2 here) and that is not going to be affected whether a new machine has a fusion drive or not.
 
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Ya that is kind of what I am assuming....The bottleneck would occur at the USB2 connection. I guess I get confused when working with Lightroom in that I don't fully comprehend where the catalogue, cache and image files being placed work best. Currently I have my catalogue on the internal HD but the images on the external. What seems to be taking a long time is the preview rendering etc...That is the part I would like to speed up if possible.
 

bobtomay

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I don't deal with this particular issue myself - all my external drive stuff is primarily movies.

Would guess that the rendering time is going to be attributable primarily with the USB connection - of course if you're dealing with importing 1,000 raw files at a time, the rendering is going to take awhile.

The Fusion drive will give you the benefit of fast shut down, boot up, application launch... that type of thing. If you are using Lightroom often, it should put the library file on the fusion drive also.

To speed up everything you do from the external though, that's going to require upgrading the external connection, if not right now, next drive you get, go with a TB drive on a Mac. I use eSATA for all my media connected to a Windows box. There was no TB port when I set all that up.
 

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