External drive question with Lightroom

[jburrows500]

Looking to move from a windows based machine (Q6600 quad) that is getting very slow when using Lightroom 4. I am looking at a refurbished iMac 27-inch 2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 for $1359. Not the fastest machine I know but I think a good upgrade for now. My current machine has 4 1T drives in it. 1 of the drives I have my pictures on it which alone is almost 500GB (raw files). What is the best solution for an external drive? I understand it has a thunderbolt port so I am guessing I would need to buy a thunderbolt drive to store my pictures on it. Is the transfer rate going to slow me down with edits etc? I am wondering if I should buy a Mac Pro instead for the ease of drive installation? Tried one years ago.. a beast.. but instead went back to windows at that time.. Thanks!

 

[jburrows500]

anyone?

 

[seniorgeek]

I use LR 4 with my base 2 year old IMAC with 12 GB ram and store my photos on a firewire Gdrive, it works great.

 

[snberk103]

The external drives are very likely going to slow down your workflow, and/or cost more than a few dollars to get hooked to minimize that slowdown. Once you price out the solution to house the HDDs you may want to look at a refurbished Mac Pro. In theory you should be able to just pop those HDDs into the Mac Pro drive bays (NOTEepending on how your current HDDs are formatted OS X may not be able to read (or easily read, or maybe just write to) the HDDS.... so do some reading this area too. I'm no expert on this, but I have skimmed threads where problems and solutions regarding the formatting of HDDs has been discussed.)

My understanding is that Thunderbolt is fast, but not as fast as internally connected HDDs. However, the speed of your HDDS may make that irrelevant. If you have slow HDDs then the connection from the HDDs to the computer may not matter.

Maybe not a solution, but perhaps it will give you some more reading to do?

 

[phoenixsan]

I second....

the Mac Pro option. In this way you can house the discs internally and as another poster said, it is hard to beat the raw speed of any connection vs. the internal HDDs. I personally have 4 discs installed internally. Going with the iMac option can maybe cheaper, but still you have to invest in the TB HDD external and tinkering/setting up it to your needs. So, if you can get a decent Mac Pro in a deal/good price, maybe you can go for it.

 

[jburrows500]

Thank you all for your input.. of the 4 drives, two are 1TB drives that contain mpeg files, and one 1TB contains just photos for lightroom. The other drive is for my OS which is a small raptor.. I dont need any great speed when it comes to the 2 full of video as that is mostly unedited clips of the kids that I have yet to turn into movies.. external firewire should be fine for those. However, the one drive (about 267GB right now) is where the pictures reside and is used daily. I wonder if maybe a thunderbolt drive external to the imac just might be the answer just for photos.. I'll give it more thought.. Yeah, I havent even explored the compatibility issues that might arise.. thanks for the help.. much appreciated..