Serious Discussion SSD or HDD for photo editing

[jagaa94]

Hi guys,

I'm planning to buy a separate disk for my pics, mostly external, because I travel a lot between my home and my work. First of all I would like to edit them in Photoshop and Lightroom, so in one hand there would be a 'lot' of writing, like copying them to the disk and then the process of editing. One says that and SSD is a good choice, because it's faster and more durable, but I don't know. I might have a little doubt about it, because of the lot of writing process. I don't know which one should I buy for this purpose. A 2TB external Samsung SSD has an average of 1200 TBW which is a massive amount, I wouldn't think that I could ever reach this amount, but data protection is way more important for me and in this case a HDD might be a better choice.

Thank you guys for your help in advance!

Have a nice day/night, Cheers

 

[HarborFront]

If you need to bring the drive to/from work then SSD is a better choice.

If there's no need to bring the drive outdoor then HDD is a better choice. You can get cheaper with more storage as compared to SSD

 

[GonzitoVir]

I recently read that SSD is a very good option and even you don't need a separatedly scratch disk for Photoshop because of the way a SSD works. Those new m.2 nvme ssd are very fast and yes, the bigger ones (like the 2tb) have a way better life span.
But keep in mind that most writing processes will be made in the drive where you have Photoshop installed and where your Windows' temp folder is. Your external SSD will mostly only receive/save the edited file.

 

[Brahman]

data protection is way more important for me and in this case a HDD might be a better choice.

Keep in mind that if SSD fails in most cases there is no way you can recover the data. But data from a hard drive can be recovered in most cases.

 

[cartaphilus]

Hi guys,

I'm planning to buy a separate disk for my pics, mostly external, because I travel a lot between my home and my work. First of all I would like to edit them in Photoshop and Lightroom, so in one hand there would be a 'lot' of writing, like copying them to the disk and then the process of editing. One says that and SSD is a good choice, because it's faster and more durable, but I don't know. I might have a little doubt about it, because of the lot of writing process. I don't know which one should I buy for this purpose. A 2TB external Samsung SSD has an average of 1200 TBW which is a massive amount, I wouldn't think that I could ever reach this amount, but data protection is way more important for me and in this case a HDD might be a better choice.

Thank you guys for your help in advance!

Have a nice day/night, Cheers

If data is that important to you then I would get both. I would get the ssd for travel mainly due to environmental rigidity and immunity to shocks. And then offload the disk to my home based triple sized raid 5 array.

 

[roger_m]

Keep in mind that if SSD fails in most cases there is no way you can recover the data. But data from a hard drive can be recovered in most cases.

That's not an issue if you keep backups. Aside from that, a SSD can typically last for many years before failing. I've had a hard drive fail after a few months use and it was no longer detected by Windows. The only way I would have been able to get my data recovered, would have been to send it to a professional data recovery company.

 

[jagaa94]

Thank all of you for helping me and giving suggestions, it helped me a lot. I was looking for a long time ago to find out how Photoshop works behind the scenes, but now I knowI'm travelling a lot, so reading your advices maybe and SSD is the best choice for me. I'm using a HDD only for archiving and sync all of my files to the cloud so maybe this way I'm gonna be safe, maybe too much but nothing is safe enough and we can't be too careful regarding our sensitive data.

 

[Marko :)]

Buy SSD and also some cloud subscription just in case.