The new MacPro has Thunderbolt 2 and so I blundered into thinking that I therefore needed a Thunderbolt 2 drive when in fact I probably don't. So I had to take the plunge and learn more about RAID. I needed that storage to be very, very reliable and very fastĮxternal SSDs were out of the question: too small or, if the right size, astonishingly expensive. I needed at least 3TB of external storage but realistically it has to be able to grow to 5TB fairly soon, maybe more. I test a lot of gear and that means a lot of comparisons - so not only do I want to be able to find any image very quickly and without switching catalogs, I also want to be able to do both A:B 'Compare' and to switch from one full screen image to another instantly. I wanted to be able to have ALL my images in ONE LR catalog, instantly accessible.

I quickly realised that my external Thunderbolt hard drive was the source of the problem and I set about looking for alternatives. I purchased a 'late 2103 Mac Pro' and, because it was in stock and therefore allowed me to skip the several week custom build queue, I took the one with the small internal SSD, planning to use it merely for system files and applications.Īll was good until I noticed how slooow Lightroom was compared to my Macbook Pro. To me, it is the washing up after a meal - necessary but of no interest in itself. So as you can see, I'm no Lloyd Chambers - I have no really thoroughly structured, analysed approach to storage and backup. In the past, I've merely added more internal SATA drives to my old-style Mac Pros and then done a bit of backup here and there.

We need a lot of storage - and if Lightroom is not to be slowed down by treacle-speed disk access, that means fast drives. Trouble is, I'm addicted to high MP cameras and large files and so, increasingly, are an awful lot of the people I know. I'm just a photographer, OK? I want to shoot, process, print and store and I want to do it quickly and reliably. Warning: this is not a review of the Promise Pegasus 2 R6: I never got that far.

Promise technology pegasus2 r6