Today’s Question: I have for several years used a 200 GB external SSD for my Lightroom Classic catalog and a 2 TB regular external drive for my photos. My total used space for those is about 900 GB. Since a 2 TB SSD is now pretty reasonably priced, is there any advantage in having separate drives for the catalog and the pics or will one new 2 TB SSD work as well or better?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If you’re going to store the Lightroom Classic catalog on an external drive there’s no need to keep the catalog on a separate hard drive from the photos. In general, with this approach I recommend keeping both on the same drive for convenience in terms of backing up and easily having access to both the catalog and photos without having to connect two drives.
More Detail: If performance is your priority, then it is generally best to keep the Lightroom Classic catalog on an internal hard drive. You can still keep the photos on an external hard drive if you prefer, such as if you don’t have adequate internal storage. However, if you’re going to keep the catalog on an external hard drive, I recommend keeping the catalog and photos on the same drive.
Having the catalog and photos on the same drive means you’ll always have access to your photos whenever you have access to your catalog. That is convenient, and also makes it easier to maintain a backup of both the catalog and photos with a single overall workflow.
So, in general I would say it is best to keep the catalog on an internal hard drive for performance reasons. But if you want to keep the catalog on an external drive, such as to enable you to move the catalog between computers, I recommend keeping the catalog on the same drive as the photos.
