fotoman150

I recently bought a 4 TB My Book because my main hard drive is full. I also backed up my hard drive and the My book to the cloud, specifically Backblaze.

I recently retouched the wedding from hell where I was going to use off camera flash and everybody hated on me. Just kidding.

So I went to export jpgs to the my book and it is taking frickin' FOREVER.

Is this normal? Is the USB backup creating a bottleneck for the throughput? There are about 1500 images to export they were shot with three cameras ranging 18-20 megapixels.

I went away for 6 hours and the export was half done. Seems to me my other exports of the same size went twice as fast.

I thought maybe the hard drive was too full and that was slowing the computer down so I stopped the export and deleted all the photographs on the main drive except for the file folder that I was working with. Don't freak out. They are triple backed up. Still very slow after I skipped all the files that were already exported and hour later only a sliver of progress.

Wasup wit dat?

catalint Loc: oslo

Hi Fotoman150,

This can be a long thread, and without more information about the rest of the system it may be hard to answer 100% accurate.
But having in mind the LR is a demanding app for system resources you must take in consideration the following: CPU , RAM , and Harddrive
Performance will depend of the combination of all three.

Now , that 4TB My book, seems to be USB 3.0 and 2.0 compatible. If your computer has USB 3.0 then this drive should not be the bottleneck. But if you system supports up 2.0 , then this is your first bottleneck. From experience I can say that the theoretic transfer speed over USB2.0, is very hard to achieve. from the theoretic speed of about 50MB/s, cant say I've seen that too often. Mostly i've seen is around 20-30MB/s. Having in mind LR will have to process each file, there will never be a constant speed from start to finish. So 20-30MB/s will also drop. That's due to exporting data information - write file to disk - process next picture. So here it helps with a fast storage.

My system can operate with 50MB/s (due to limitation on drives in my NAS for now) , and from one test of exporting 1200 pictures, with full size, it's calculated just over an hour. But still , I do not calculate my speed to be constant 50MB/s from start to finish. This is due to the process of file creation from LR. If I was to copy a single file that has the same size as all the 1200 pictures I export , then my system would be able the achive the 50MB/s and hold it constan over the entire copy process. So I hope you understand why the process of LR export takes more time.

It seems like the amount of memory LR uses for this process, is about 3GB ram. I have plenty. But If your system has something around 8GB (i am assuming a standard PC/MAC) then it would help to add more ram as I believe your system + LR export is going to eat over 50%-60%, of RAM and will cause your system to swap to disk. That will also create a dramatic change in speed. At last , you should make sure there are no other disk operations to your external 4TB at the same time as your export runs. Like the backup you mentioned.

If you find your drive is not the bottleneck , then your other windows resource are the bottleneck. Like CPU and RAM.
In order to investigate a little more, you should take use of Task Manager and Performance tab and watch the CPU, RAM, and Harddrive while you export.
Here should be fairly simple to read. The high constant percentage of cpu ram and/or disk should indicate where your system struggles.

I hope it help.

C.

fotoman150

Thanks. I have to agree with your assessment. I took a look at the task manager. There is only a little hardrive utilization every now and then.

I have 6 gigs of RAM and USB 3.0 ports according to the device manager.

The backup was paused but it seems to restart itself on it's own. So I shut it down again. Now shutting down chrome and UHH to help out. Thanks.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

With only 6gb ram, you are below the threshold of what is generally considered enough ram to run Lr. Windows 7 requires 2GB, leaving you only 4GB to run Lr. So while Lr needs 8, your computer needs 10GB to run Win7 AND Lr. If you are also running other processes, like a web browser or other software, each needs it's own ram as well. Windows 10 wants 4 GB all to itself. This is why most people use 16GB as a minimum, and 32 if you use Photoshop as well.

While USB 3 can transmit data at speeds "up to " 640 MB/s, this is just the theoretical max throughput. SATA III, the older standard for drive interfaces is capable of 600MB/s, so "theoretically" USB 3.0 is slightly faster. Real life performance in both circumstances is lower.

But of greater importance is the actual drive performance, which can range from a read/write speed of 171/158MB/sec, for a fast SATA III drive, to 144/137MB/s for a slower drive. but it is not even close to what the performance can be with an internal drive. Typically, a SATA III SSD will perform on average 2X faster. The fastest interface for SSD is the NVMe m.2 SSD, which can theoretically push through 2200MB/s, and realistically speaking would give you a benchmark of about 1.1GB/s. Your computer would need to have bus and cpu support to run at these speeds.

But I'll guess that your computer is older and possibly under powered as well. A slow dual core computer will make Lr really slow. Lr does best with a hyperthreaded cpu with 6-8 cores and 16 gb ram. One last thing - if your drive is more than 75% full, you are also going to experience slow performance. The fact that your computer seems to be waiting for Lr to process the files sounds like a cpu issue.

I think you may need a new computer. It may be too old to upgrade it - it will cost a bit and there is only so much performance you can expect to gain from upgrading an older machine.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

1500 in over six hours is not right. Even raw images would go faster than that. When I move/copy images, I drag and drop a bunch at a time, and it's done in a few minutes. It's probably a USB 3.0 connection, so it should be fast. Even 2.0 should be faster than that. How are you getting the files from one place to another - drag and drop?

Yes, shutting down everything else will speed things up.

cthahn

frickin'. Is that a new word in the dictionary? Say it the way it is or don't use it at all. Those that use it when they write are not very professional.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Yes, it is very annoying when people leave the final "g" off words.

JaiGieEse Loc: Foxworth, MS

Keep in mind that another very important factor in data transfer is your computer's clock speed and type, usb bus, among other things. My 27-inch mid-2014 iMac has a 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5 processor. System is USB 3.0. My 15-inch mid-2012 MacBook Pro has a 2.3 Ghz Intel Core i7 processor, and is a USB 2.0 system. File copying to external drives goes much faster on the iMac, given the USB 3.0 bus and the faster clock speed, even though the iMac has an i5 chip, compared to the MacBook Pro's i7. Something else I've noted is that copying files from the MacBook Pro to the iMac across the WiFi net is noticeably slower than is a WiFi copy from the iMac to the MacBook Pro.

There are many background processes at play all the time, and each of these will slow a file transfer to some extent. My Macs came with a nifty little utility called "Activity Monitor." Run this utility and you'll get a list of all processes in play, including normally hidden background processes. The utility will tell you which processes are active, how much ram they're using, how much energy, percentage of CPU usage, and many other informative things. Activity Monitor also allows one to terminate processes. If you're seeing something that isn't system-required and you don't need it while you're copying files, you can temporarily shut down the process.

In any case, copying of large amounts of files is generally always time-consuming. I have a three terabyte WD MyBook drive that was about 3/4ths full and I had need to add still more data. So I purchased a six terabyte WD MyBook and copied roughly 2.25tb of files from the 3tb drive to the 6tb. Took about six hours, as I recall.

My system serves me well, at present, but whenever Apple releases the iMac Pro, I'll be purchasing one of those. Yep. Fer Sure.

Paul Buckhiester Loc: Columbus, GA USA

Check to see what services/programs are running. Sounds like something is eating up all your resources.

fotoman150

The original import would not fit on the hard drive so I did it in two stages.

I backed up the photographs to an external drive. Then I backed up the whole system to the cloud.

I deleted the photographs on the C: drive except the ones I was working with. Then I did another import and exported the retouched photos to the C; drive this time.

Everything went very fast and I have all the file in place by using this PC and highlighting and dragging the last of the jpgs onto the F drive. Now I am ready to copy them to a thumb drive and post them to my website for the bride to view and order.

Exporting to the external drive is a no no apparently.

fotoman150

One thing I did was remove a bunch of stuff from the startup and restart the computer. I'm sure that helped.

It seems transferring file to the external drive is ok but exporting from Lightroom to an external is difficult for the computer.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Stop yer nit pickin'!