If you’re not a professional why are you using Lightroom instead of Photos?
What extra features do you capitalise on?
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Does my M2 have too little memory for Lightroom?
- Thread starter Moriske
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What extra features do you capitalise on?
Good question.
I use Ligtroom cheaply with a student license.
Perfect tool to catalog my entire collection of photos and apply edits, and so on. Something I can't do with the standard photo app.
I use Ligtroom cheaply with a student license.
Perfect tool to catalog my entire collection of photos and apply edits, and so on. Something I can't do with the standard photo app.
That really depends on a per case basis. For most people it will be fine. My friend just got a new MacBook Air. She asked me what to get SSD wise, I told her 256GB. For her 256GB is enough and she certainly won’t be using Lightroom. But if she ran it like a pro user, Lightroom, Final Cut, 3D rendering, it wouldn’t last long. All the SSD deaths I’ve seen has been from people who do that.
again, how long, and how long are the different life expectancies of a 512gb drive vs a 1tb? in the real world, does it in fact matter? (am asking...).
i ran logic pro and FCP exclusively on my 2019 imac, and now, on my M2 mini, with a 512GB drive... and have no worries about my drive dying 🤔
Lifetime on paper is half for 512GB vs 1TB drive. In practice, probably slightly worse, because right off the bat, a larger chunk of your drive is used up by the system and whatever apps you have loaded, leaving less room for the drive to do wear leveling.again, how long, and how long are the different life expectancies of a 512gb drive vs a 1tb? in the real world, does it in fact matter? (am asking...).
i ran logic pro and FCP exclusively on my 2019 imac, and now, on my M2 mini, with a 512GB drive... and have no worries about my drive dying
and how long is the theoretical lifetime of a 1TB SSD? just seems like, in the real world, this is a non-issue... just as living on my 256gb SSD (on an M2 air), has never felt 'slow', or 'compromised' to me. my real-world experiences are far more valuable (to me) than theories, benchmarks, or youtube hysteria. but that's just me 😎
I answered that partly above, in short the difference will be measured in years. You can use up an entire SSDs life expectancy by writing to it excessively in a matter of 3-5 years if you really try. For anyone else you should expect at least twice that, 6-10 years. Many users won't write much data onto their SSDs and will see a lifespan beyond 10 years where it's then a question of what other component might fail first.
To be more precise, there isn't a general rule of thumb for 500GB vs 1TB SSDs. With a 500GB SSD for example you can spread out the data onto four 128GB NAND flash memory chips or two 256GB ones. Overall the 4x128 version could have a slightly higher endurance since the writes can be spread across more chips, though it won't necessarily double the endurance since the chips themselves have a lower capacity and thus a lower individual endurance rating.
There are a few things we know though:
- The current M2 Macs with only 250GB of storage use a single chip and all other bigger Apple SSDs use at least two chips. So these tiny M2 Apple SSDs will have very roughly only half the endurance of 500GB+ Apple SSDs. We can also see that the performance is roughly cut in half as well due to this. Conclusion is to avoid 120GB and 250GB SSDs if you want a high endurance rating and best performance.
- Often SSDs with 1TB of total capacity have about twice the endurance of 500GB SSDs.
- Usually the endurance does not increase beyond 1TB, so 2TB SSDs won't be a better buy unless you need the extra capacity.
How much can you write to an Apple SSD, what are the actual numbers? As I wrote above:
For example my own 14" Macbook has seen heavy workloads for a full year but has 64GiB of RAM, so swap space is rarely used. The SSD reports 7TB written in total and more than 99% endurance remaining. Based on this usage the SSD would easily last 20 years and more (ignoring aging components). If I only had a tiny SSD with a much worse endurance rating, it would still last well above 10 years.
To put this differently: Calculating 7TB/1,25PB comes out to 0,56% of life expectancy used up (as in the quote above) within one year.
And if I had a tiny SSD with a worse endurance rating, let's say half of that, I'd have used up 1,12% in one year. Let's say I use this Mac for 6 years, which sounds fair to me, 6,72% used up (again, if this was a worse rated SSD than it actually is). Now how much data would I have to write to this SSD every year to kill it in the 6th year? I'd have to write 104TB to it every year, to kill a 250GB M2 Apple SSD once 6 years are up.
That's actually not a great endurance rating if that were true - which it might not be, I just assumed some low fantasy endurance rating for a 250GB M2 Apple SSD. But even then, writing 104TB per year to a 250GB SSD just via swap space usage should really be impossible, in my opinion. And what write heavy applications could you let loose on such a tiny SSD in the first place.
/Edit: But I do not mean to imply that it is ok for Apple to downgrade the 250GB SSDs in their newer M2 Macs to cut endurance and performance in half. That is really really bad behaviour to make the successor much slower, and not even mentioning it anywhere.
I wonder whether this discussion of Photos vs Lightroom is of any interest then.
Photos vs Lightroom: Why Apple’s App Is Good Enough for Almost Everyone
If you have a fancy camera and access to Apple's Photos app, then you already have everything you need for in-depth photo editing.
In my experience professional software such as Word, Photoshop, Lightroom, Dreamweaver is absolutely amazing, however 95% of what it does is usually left unused by all but the most demanding of professionals.
If your main requirements are cataloging and editing then Photos may have come of age for you.
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Since I am a strong user of RAW and JPG, I quickly ran into the borders in the Photo AP. In short, Lightroom is a required for me.
Swap size is not a great indicator, because it doesn't shrink. If you do something that blows up swap, the swap size stays that large, even if your usage goes down or even disappears.
If you do something quite intensive, such as generating smart previews for the entire catalog, you could well blow out a bunch of swap. If you keep doing that over and over again, you'll do as has been warned and mess up the wear leveling. OTOH if you then go back to editing single files, particularly smaller ones such as come from most phones, you won't touch that swap again, possibly for months.
Also, I forget who said it, but the proportion of the drive that is the OS does not matter to wear leveling. That happens way, way below the file system level in the device. Yes the part of the file system that you will write on is smaller, but the OS itself is almost never touched (nearly always once per upgrade) and the spare wear blocks will get used for the writable part of the file system. Basically you have fixed amount of spare blocks, and they get used for whatever exceeds the wear threshold. In the limit, suppose you had a 100GB device and a 99.9GB OS. You would be devoting essentially all of the spare blocks to that 0.01GB, so you could rewrite it quite a few times before wearing out the device as a whole.
If you do something quite intensive, such as generating smart previews for the entire catalog, you could well blow out a bunch of swap. If you keep doing that over and over again, you'll do as has been warned and mess up the wear leveling. OTOH if you then go back to editing single files, particularly smaller ones such as come from most phones, you won't touch that swap again, possibly for months.
Also, I forget who said it, but the proportion of the drive that is the OS does not matter to wear leveling. That happens way, way below the file system level in the device. Yes the part of the file system that you will write on is smaller, but the OS itself is almost never touched (nearly always once per upgrade) and the spare wear blocks will get used for the writable part of the file system. Basically you have fixed amount of spare blocks, and they get used for whatever exceeds the wear threshold. In the limit, suppose you had a 100GB device and a 99.9GB OS. You would be devoting essentially all of the spare blocks to that 0.01GB, so you could rewrite it quite a few times before wearing out the device as a whole.
Your Mac is behaving as expected. Having some swap does affect overall performance - but if you’re not being paid for your work, the small gain you’d get isn’t worth the cost.
There is no guess work needed in trying to figure out how swap is affecting your SSD. There are tools like DriveDX that will report the power on hours and how much data has been written to the SSD. If you don't mind using terminal, you can get that same information by installing homebrew, and then installing smartmontools. This will also let you check how many hours and data have been written to the drive.
Realize, though, that just because your swap size might be 2GB, that does not mean you are only writing 2GB of data to the SSD. That is the total size of the swap file, from which data is constantly writing and reading from the SSD.
When the M1 Mini came out, I decided to try out the 8GB model and saw many TBs per day being written to the SSD due to excessive swap.
I can't imagine that the storage Apple is using is of any better quality than something like the Samsung 990 Pro. The 990 Pro 1TB drive has a TBW rating of 600. Which would be 300 TBW for a 500GB drive, and only 150 TBW for a 256GB drive.
Using that information and either a paid tool like DriveDX, or a free tool like smartmontools will really enable you to check your usage, and either put your mind to rest or help you decide if you actually need more RAM.
Hope that helps a little.
Realize, though, that just because your swap size might be 2GB, that does not mean you are only writing 2GB of data to the SSD. That is the total size of the swap file, from which data is constantly writing and reading from the SSD.
When the M1 Mini came out, I decided to try out the 8GB model and saw many TBs per day being written to the SSD due to excessive swap.
I can't imagine that the storage Apple is using is of any better quality than something like the Samsung 990 Pro. The 990 Pro 1TB drive has a TBW rating of 600. Which would be 300 TBW for a 500GB drive, and only 150 TBW for a 256GB drive.
Using that information and either a paid tool like DriveDX, or a free tool like smartmontools will really enable you to check your usage, and either put your mind to rest or help you decide if you actually need more RAM.
Hope that helps a little.
@All thanks for your great contribution.
In the meantime I have summarized the hardware specifications for my needs and in function of Lightroom as a hobby photographer.
This means that the configuration below should suffice.
- Processor: M2
- Storage: 512GB SSD
- Memory: 16GB
- Network: 10GBE (Synology DS923+ which is equipped with 10GBE adapter).
In the meantime I have summarized the hardware specifications for my needs and in function of Lightroom as a hobby photographer.
This means that the configuration below should suffice.
- Processor: M2
- Storage: 512GB SSD
- Memory: 16GB
- Network: 10GBE (Synology DS923+ which is equipped with 10GBE adapter).
What I'm finding is that Lightroom is just a slow program. I'm coming from an iMac with a mechanical external USB 2.0 drive to a Mini M2 Pro with a Thunderbolt 4 SSD drive, and it's certainly faster, no doubt, but it's not mind blowing. I was expecting everything to be lightning fast, but it still lags at times. The main improvement comes from the faster drive, which makes loading faster, but it still feels slow overall. Obviously it's a big improvement but just not as much as I had hoped for.
I believe coolerkid is onto something.
I'm not much of an Adobe user, but I've read several times previously that their applications just aren't "that fast" (due to the coding in the apps themselves).
Seems to me that when trying to coax the best performance from a "slow" app, CPU power becomes more important than the absolute amount of RAM you have...
I'm not much of an Adobe user, but I've read several times previously that their applications just aren't "that fast" (due to the coding in the apps themselves).
Seems to me that when trying to coax the best performance from a "slow" app, CPU power becomes more important than the absolute amount of RAM you have...
Is there a tool that shows how many TB's have been written to an SSD thus far?
EDIT: Nevermind, found the answer to my question
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We've always known that to be true about Adobe programs, Steve Jobs used to call them lazy. But I thought throwing one of the fastest Macs and SSDs available at it would overcome any kind of software limitations and make it fly, but doesn't appear to be the case. I was coming from an 8 year old iMac computer with an insanely slow external drive, to now one of the fastest setups available, and I expected everything to feel instantaneous, but it's only marginally better performance. Many things that should be instantaneous still have a notable delay. For instance it can still take 30+ seconds to load an image when I click on it in the library, where as any other program, even Preview will load it instantly. Clicking on different sliders still lags to apply the effects, which I thought would be instant with this computer.
Photoshop and Lightroom are memory hungry. Go to Preferences and move the RAM slider so it's never higher than 50%. You may observe some fall in performance, especially when heavy editing, but that would only affect pro work.
I thought this video did a good job of demonstrating an actual professional using a base M2Pro for mid to heavy level video editing:
I personally upgraded the SSD on my M2Pro to 1TB simply for the faster write speeds and longevity.
And I feel that 16GB of memory should be enough for someone like myself that only does video editing and photography as a hobby. If I get 5 years of reliable and efficient performance, I'll be very happy with my decision.
I personally upgraded the SSD on my M2Pro to 1TB simply for the faster write speeds and longevity.
And I feel that 16GB of memory should be enough for someone like myself that only does video editing and photography as a hobby. If I get 5 years of reliable and efficient performance, I'll be very happy with my decision.
Some of us use Lightroom for RAW editing and put the finished photos on Apple Photos. So I use both.
Adobe software is just resource hog trash. I switched to the Affinity programs, am still on V1 and am extremely happy with it. I have yet to find a good Lightroom replacement but I'm looking, my old LR6 library is around 125k photos.
DaVinci is a million times more efficient than Premiere. On my base M2 I can run OBS and edit 1080p in DaVinvi at the same time. My old 64GB 2018 Mini was seeing Premiere eat up a nasty amount of ram for the same workflow.
Swap size means nothing, swap rate is what matters. Unfortunately Activity Monitor doesn't really show that. iStat Menu can show it, and 'vm_stat n' for some interval time n can show it.
Opening a hundred Chrome tabs will create a swapfile, but it won't page any faster than you can click and read tabs.
Does Lightroom use system swap? If I remember (and it's been a long while), Photoshop creates it's own disk file and manages swap itself.