Firewire Drives: Lightroom & Space Savings

CATEGORIES: Living In Layers | RC | September 30, 2008

Happy Tuesday everyone! I wanted to start off by answering another piece of viewer mail that came in last couple of days. This comment came in from Mike Patterson:

R.C.,
Could you go into a little more detail on your remote firewire drives? What kind of drives are you using. I’m assuming your using firewire 800, is that correct? What are you thoughts on eSATA? What do you have in the way of internal drives if you are working off the external ones?

Hey Mike, thanks for reading! Let me tell you how I set it my computer up:
These days I am using a Macbook Pro 2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. It has a 200GB Hard Drive, factory installed. The way that I see it, the more hard drive space that I have left free on the computer, the better. Because of this I usually run around with 3 Firewire drives inside of my computer bag. The Firewire drives I use are either Lacie FW800 drives or Firewire 800 drives I get from Other World Computing (320GB OWC Mercury On The Go Drives).

Three things usually clog up my computer: Pet Projects, Work Projects, and My iTunes Collection (A surefire way of getting all of your space chewed up on your computer is to get iTunes and then say “Hey.. I can put my entire CD collection on this… 13,000 songs later.. you’re going to start to run low). Let’s go over the drives now

iTunes and Personal Folders
I use one of the drives as a Pet Project / iTunes Collection drive with two main folders - RC Stuff and iTunes Collection. When I start iTunes, I go into the Advanced Preferences and set the iTunes Music Folder location as the folder on the Firewire Drive. Add the files from that folder and in about 2 hours.. your collection is done. Downside to this is that whenever you want to use/sync iTunes you need to have your FW drive connected. If you don’t, the Advanced Preferences will change back to its original default and the music will be unavailable. Don’t worry. When you connect your drive back to the computer, the setting changes back and the files are visible. Separating my projects and all of this random “play” stuff takes a BIG load off of the laptop, letting me reserve that space for more important things.

The Lightroom Catalog(s) Drive
The second FW drive is used for the Lightroom images for specific Catalogs. Whenever I import images into Lightroom 2, I tell Lightroom to convert them to DNG files, and I specify the location as the Firewire Drive that I have collected. If I setup Lightroom 2 to use multiple catalogs on startup (work catalog / personal catalog), each of these catalogs store files into their own separate FW drives. This lets me keep my work separate.

Great part about this is that I still haven’t clogged up my drive with files, and access is still pretty fast.

Now, one of the first things that I do in Lightroom is work on reject/pick images, then mark my keepers on a star system. All of this can be done without the drives ever being connected, so half of the workflow in Lightroom doesn’t even need the drive!

Sorry guys.. this is getting wordy, but it’s really important stuff. Click on “Read More” to follow the rest of the tutorial.. you’ll totally get something out of it!

So.. where was I? Ah Yes…

When it comes time to delete any unwanted files, I plug in the appropriate drive, start up Lightroom, and begin the rejected trash session. Any subsequent Develop module stuff I need to do from here on in I do with the Firewire drive connected. You figure, if you’re in the “editing” portion of your workflow, chances are you’re in a spot where you’re not going to be moving much, so plugging in the drives isn’t going to be a big deal here.

What About Shooting Tethered?
This doesn’t really bother me, I can shoot without the drives - and here’s why. If you are at a shoot when you are shooting tethered, are you really going to be in the Develop module needing to work on all of the other images? Didn’t think so. Setup your watched folder on your desktop and have Lightroom automatically sync from that watched folder to another folder on the desktop - give it a project name (like “Robinson Shoot 04052008″). Now you can shoot tethered, but all of the stuff is being imported into your catalog - those images going into that folder on the desktop.

If you’re on the move but need to work on the sorting rejects/picks phase, you can work comfortably knowing the files are on the desktop. When you have the time to plug in the drives, quit Lightroom and move the “Robinson Shoot 04052008″ folder to your Firewire drive of choice. When you start Lightroom, it’s not going to know where any of those images are. Here’s the cool part though: When you try to edit one of those images, Lightroom will tell you “hey.. I cant find the image, tell me where it is.” The moment you tell Lightroom where one of those images are, the rest of the images in that folder will be automatically updated, and you’re back in business.

Firewire 800 Versus eSATA
Now, this by no means is a scientific measurement, so don’t hold me to it. However, I had a couple of problems with wanting to go eSATA with a setup like this:

1. It required that I have an Expresscard/eSATA setup protruding from the laptop. Boo!
2. The eSATA drives I had were not bus powered, which meant I needed to plug in power. Boo!

The biggest problem I had with this however was speed. While eSATA is supposed to technically be faster than Firewire 800, I never really noticed it to be much faster moving files back and forth. I believe this to be the case because of the old “you’re only as fast as your slowest link” maxim. Figure, the hard drives are almost usually 5400 rpm, so you can only put stuff into them -so- fast. eSATA just couldn’t get the info in any faster than the drive can write, so in that, there was no gain. Even if you had a 7200rpm drive, you can still get those drives as FW800 so it would be better that way anyway (see point 1 and 2)

Now, if you want to get a much bigger (both in size and footprint) drive that were something like RAID0 across drives, then I would assume you’d see a faster speed adjustment. This however wouldn’t be as portable.

What About The Third Drive
So, I did mention there were 3 drives, and only really talked about 2. What I usually do with the third drive (recently) is install a clean operating system (Leopard) and specific apps. Whenever I need to do some serious operating system/application fooling around that I KNOW will mess up my computer install, I boot to that drive and do it there. That way, if that OS gets really messed up, I just erase it and re-image the drive and the OS and apps are back up in under 20 minutes. It’s a sweet trick really..

I hope that answers the question for you! If anything it also gives all of you a couple of tips on how to setup external drives so that those internal hard drives stay as clean as possible. If you guys do a similar setup, or have any other questions, shoot me a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

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