Mac OS 10.15 apparently needs about 25GB space, and then you'll have your apps such as Lightroom and Photoshop taking up quite a bit of space too. You also need at least 20GB of fast drive storage for a Photoshop scratch disk, based on what I've read. If the internal drive in your machine is flash, as Richard points out, then you're already good to go in this respect. You really want your operating system and any software such as Lightroom installed on a fast SSD (or flash) drive. Any recommendations would be gratefully received. What size is "small" for the scratch? Would say 128gb do? I am conscious of my limited budget I have seen an external seagate HDD that is cheap as a storage possibility, question is, would it slow everything down? I wasn't thinking of using that as a scratch because I know I need speed for that.
This thread will be a great OK, I am way out of the computerspeak loop but I am presuming the scratch drive option is to stop Photoshop requiring 10gb chunks of my internal hard drive to use as a cache.
That same external drive will be reusable if you should upgrade to a different machine in years to come, so it's a safe investment Thank you. I wouldn't spend a lot on it - perhaps go for something like the Kioxia EXCERIA 240 GB 2.5" SSD I used, and spend more on an external USB SSD, sized per your requirements. Given the similarity in spec to my Lenovo, I think you'll do just fine with this "new-to-you" Macbook Air if you upgrade to an SSD. My own experience with older equipment isn't directly relevant, but might prove useful as a comparison. That same external drive will be reusable if you should upgrade to a different machine in years to come, so it's a safe investment With the SSD fitted, the PC is quite useable for raw processing and TIFF / JPEG editing, but with the HDD, it was slow. I use an external USB thumb drive for storing images, as I transfer these to my main PC at a later time - but if this was my main PC, I'd use a large external USB SSD.Įven though the SSD's performance is restricted by the Lenovo's SATA II interface, it still makes huge difference to general performance compared to the HDD it replaced. A little patience is needed with heavier-duty editing, but for the usual exposure, contrast, tone-curve, colour noise reduction stuff, the performance is more than adequate. None of these applications runs "like the wind", but they're certainly useable. On Windows, I also use my stand-alone copy of Lightroom 6. Under both operating systems, I use current versions of Darktable, RawTherapee and GIMP.
I have it set up to dual boot Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS.
I have a 2013 Lenovo M72e Tiny mini-desktop PC, with i5-3470T dual-core (with hyperthreading) CPU, 8GB RAM and 240GB SSD (upgraded from the original 320GB HDD), but it's a SATA II drive interface so not benefiting from the full performance of the drive.
Thanks in advance My own experience with older equipment isn't directly relevant, but might prove useful as a comparison. This is a gift for my photography so getting something different isn't an option. The questions are, Will the HDD be big enough initially? Are there any external options to make it more manageable? What is the biggest HDD I could put in it and is it worth spending the money. I have an adobe subscription so that will be going on. I currently process on a tablet or a very old, very basic, very slow windows laptop so this has to be better. I think it is the base model, 8gb ram, 128gb HDD. My son is giving me his 2013 macbook air.