External SSD drive to save Lightroom catalogue

[BrianN]

Good afternoon everyone,

I am wondering if anyone here has any advice about this.

I am going on a two month trip to New Zealand and recently bought a Dell XPS 15 laptop which has an SD card built in.

It has 1TB of internal storage and 32G of RAM, I also bought a Samsung 2Tb external SSD.

Ideally I don't want to fill the laptop internal memory which may effect performance.

Is it ok to have my lightroom catalogue stored on the external SSD.

Thanks in advance if anyone has knowledge.

 

[BrianN]

I would keep the catalogue files on the laptop, but point it towards the actual pictures stored on the SSD - editing performance /may/ be affected depending on the type of connect/speed of the SSD, but you most likely won't notice any difference editing photos only video

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Perfect thanks for that...I will check it out.

 

[davidzvi]

Unless it's changed, you have 2 internal slots for NVMe drives in your xps15. At least the one I'm typing on right now does. I have a 512GB C: drive and 2TB D: drive. Images and catalogs on D:

It's one of the main reasons I got the XPS15 2 user-upgradable RAM and drive slots, 64GB of RAM currently which I think is the max.

 

[BrianN]

Unless it's changed, you have 2 internal slots for NVMe drives in your xps15. At least the one I'm typing on right now does. I have a 512GB C: drive and 2TB D: drive. Images and catalogs on D:

It's one of the main reasons I got the XPS15 2 user-upgradable RAM and drive slots, 64GB of RAM currently which I think is the max.

Yeah mine does , thanks for that.

 

[GT12]

On trips like that I take two external SSDs and use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy one to the other. I also back up the LR catalogue from internal to external SSD. I carry one of the SSDs in my pocket or backpack just in case my laptop gets stolen or something fries.

 

[khollister]

I'm a Mac user, but my LR catalog as well as the photos are on external SSD's due to moving between my Mac Studio and MacBook Pro 14. I have 2 SSD's that are clones of each other and just pop them in the laptop bag when traveling. The working SSD's contain the LR catalog and the last few months of photos. I have another pair of SSD's that contain the older archive of photos that my LR catalog points to. This primarily because the travel-friendly (i.e. smallest - Samsung T7/9 type) are currently limited to 4TB, which is not large enough to hold everything.