SSD External for editing??

[Doren Sorell]

I have this computer setup:

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.2 GHz Intel Core i5
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1 GB

And I've read and seen that many photographers and videographers use an external SSD drive to edit off of. I'm curious how that works with Affinity Photo, and if it actually makes things smoother and faster, maybe with regards with cache and things like this .... but I am not a techie, nor do I understand what goes on behind the scenes. 

Everything works quite well, but if I have many layers, like in a composite, which has many images/photos, and maybe live filters, it's starts slowing down a lot. 

Thus, trying to see if anyone here has used or is using a setup like this. 

One day, hopefully soon, I'll get a brand new computer.

Thanks in advance! 

[Palatino]

I use a Samsung T5. It doesn't turn my Mac mini (Late 2014)  into a workstation, but I can work with it.

[Bad_Wolf]

It is better to use an SSD for your operating system and applications. Using an extern SSD will only give you a little bit better performance. The highest performance gain is with your operating system and applications.

[IanSG]

I've just tried working with the same files (.dng & .afphoto) loaded onto an SSD and a USB 3 stick loaded in a USB 2 port - subjectively there was no difference and the couple of timings I did with the sweep second finger on my watch were also the same.  A stop watch might have shown a difference, but if you need to be that careful with the measurements it's probably a non-issue.  I'm using an i7 based PC running Win 10.

[Jowday]

23 hours ago, Doren Sorell said:

I have this computer setup:

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.2 GHz Intel Core i5
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1 GB

And I've read and seen that many photographers and videographers use an external SSD drive to edit off of. I'm curious how that works with Affinity Photo, and if it actually makes things smoother and faster, maybe with regards with cache and things like this .... but I am not a techie, nor do I understand what goes on behind the scenes. 

Everything works quite well, but if I have many layers, like in a composite, which has many images/photos, and maybe live filters, it's starts slowing down a lot. 

Thus, trying to see if anyone here has used or is using a setup like this. 

One day, hopefully soon, I'll get a brand new computer.

Thanks in advance! 

That alone shouldn't make any visible performance boost in Affinity Photo unless your primary drive is almost full, fragmented and the drive is busy doing whatever.

I always used an external drive - because it makes more sense to have a much larger external storage and no worries about space. I have 4TB on one of them. I never used the primary harddrive for data. Never. Even on laptops. 

What these photographers may be utilizing is the scratch disk feature in Adobe Photoshop - using one or more other disk drives (other than the primary) for supplemental virtual memory. (they call it temporary storage). That does make Photoshop faster and makes certain crazy operations possible. I made some insanely big panoramas from many huge RAW files using the automatic Photomerge feature. It took some time and all drives where utilized and spinning like crazy but it was possible on hardware I did not believe could pull it off. That was years ago.

Affinity Photo doesn't have this feature. It relies on the operating system itself.

I don't use Photo for editing photos (just Photoshop and others) - only for digital art - so I have no personal experience.

In a Windows setup your hardware would be sufficient for most things I do - with external storage added for the many data. But you never regret buying something new with hardware that old and you could never go back either once you get used to the faster machine.