All photos on NAS?

Currently my photos are on local hard disks which are backed up to a NAS

would it be a problem if I switched things around and just worked completely off the NAS?

Would Lightroom have trouble/would it be very sluggish in comparison to being on local disks?

Looking to buy a new computer, but it doesn't have enough slots for many local hard drives...

Your local drive will be faster, but if you have a gigabit LAN and a NAS fast enough to take advantage, your NAS may be "fast enough".

As to limited drive bays, either get a computer with more drive bays and SATA connections (they are out there - mine has 6 +2 for optical drives) or use your local drive for your working drive... IOW, don't keep everything local; just the photos you are currently working with.

If you use your NAS as your primary storage, you'll still want to keep a backup somewhere.

NAS would be slower. plus you loose your backup.

Keep in mind that Lightroom library will still need to be on the local disk as it doesn't support NAS drives. The images can be hosted from the NAS though.

JS

The new computer is on sale.. but the tower only has slots for 2 drives. Not 100% sure what the motherboard actually can support..

I guess it also does make sense to have the most recent import on local disk, faster... then move to the NAS.

The NAS appears to read at about 50-60MB/s...

If you put your photos on an NAS, you can use the former external drives for a backup of the NAS, I've done that for years.... If you've been keeping anything other than scratch work on your desktop, you are brave, I don't trust them with all the viruses on the web... Unless it has a dedicated boot/software drive and a separate drive for data.

Last.. NAS, What do you want to spend? If you use JPEGs, it shouldn't matter much, they are usually small, all RAW files and you need a bigger faster NAS. You can easily get speeds similar to what you have on your local hard drive, but it costs money. I'd say for that speed, at least a couple of grand. Close to $2000 for the NAS and then you need the drives to populate it. A $200 NAS with drives built in, is going to be slow. Of course you should try the one you have now and see if its fast enough.

Best wishes

Mark H

Performance will depend on which NAS you get. Mine will do 120MB/sec (maxes out Gigabit Ethernet) but I've seen others only hit 20MB/sec or so. I keep everything, including my Lightroom raw files on the NAS. The important stuff also gets backed up to a USB 3.0 drive and Crashplan (online backup).

My current workflow is to import files from the memory card to a secondary SSD in my PC. Once I'm pretty much finished editing, I drag them to the NAS within Lightroom. Editing right off the NAS isn't exactly slow, but doing it from the SSD is faster.

What NAS do you have? You could *possibly* use it with iSCSI to turn it into a dynamic local disc thus allowing you to keep your images + library on it, and then you could use an external drive for backup.

If you're looking for a new system, get one with a larger case. It may be intimidating, but I recommend getting a budget and building one yourself. You could get a case that will easily hold 5 drives. If you wanted to go this route but aren't sure how, I or many others here could probably help you through it. For the most part, building a desktop is fairly simple.

My NAS is a DS413J.

It looks like it'll read at about 100mb/s. Though probably slower to "load" dozens of smaller 20MB raw files

Best solution for your situation is to add a USB3 external hard drive (if your system supports USB3), maybe one 4TB or a few lesser capacities. Hopefully when you say NEW computer, it *should* have atleast 2+ USB3 ports unless its laptop where they usually come with just one.

Working off a NAS is great, but then you need another device to backup the NAS? Adding 1+ USB drives to a NAS is great for backup until a power surge comes along where the files in the NAS & backup drive get corrupted the same time.

kaitlyn2004 wrote in post #15574509
My NAS is a DS413J.

It looks like it'll read at about 100mb/s. Though probably slower to "load" dozens of smaller 20MB raw files

That unit does support iSCSI targets. Here is a guide from the Synology website on how to set them up if you're interested. It's relatively simple to do.

http://forum.synology.​com …_the_Synology_D​iskStation

WaterVsAnchor wrote in post #15576759
That unit does support iSCSI targets. Here is a guide from the Synology website on how to set them up if you're interested. It's relatively simple to do.

http://forum.synology.​com …_the_Synology_D​iskStation

The limit is the network. iSCSI will have the same limit.

iSCSI is also not shared. The files in an iSCSI LUN can not be accessed by other devices unless they mount it, it can only be used by computer at a time. Short of sharing the files out on the computer that has it mounted. Its a different beast.

I host my main files on a synology, via a gigabit connection, and have no particular issues. At some technical level, I guess I know it is not as fast, but in a practical sense, it performs just fine. If you have other "things" going on on your local hard disk, you can also decrease I/O contention by putting it elsewhere.

Standard IT answer: It Depends.

Works for me tho.