On that second sentence about the drive, I am not a die-hard technical person on equipment so I just never even think about that. I always back up, replace drives as needed, and do watch out for how much data I am putting on them, so thanks for sharing that information. On the first sentence, regarding "spares LR from having to process them unnecessarily," I don't know what you mean by this as LR does not process anything until you start the process of editing. All the program does is load the images into a folder of your choice and then link the folder to the program application, so that sentence is confusing for me. If any changes are made to the image as you viewed it in the application, the change would be made to the catalog, which is separate from your images. The only time I've had a corrupt catalog when I did something wrong, which happens every so often, but backing up the catalog along the way means you can use the backup.