Editing with wireless harddrive?

Has anyone with experience with editing using LR with files stored on a external harddrive connected wirelessly? That was a mouthful but looking for a super portable solution of a light, small windows tablet, hooked wirelessly to an external drive like a western digital My Passport Wireless Pro or similar device to edit my photos. Mainly concerned about speed and responsiveness. Thanks!

Heya,

Well, the immediate difference will be that it's slower in some respects. But for the editing, the data will be in RAM, and on a the scratch disk, not on the source drive over wifi. It will merely load then be ready to be worked on, saved when done, so to speak. Depends on how you have it configured, but that's the gist. Transfer will be slower with a bit of lag just due to handshaking over wifi verifying packets. Depends how large the files are. 18~24Mb files will take a few seconds to go through the handshake, transfer, verify, load to RAM, ready for editing, etc. Scrolling through files with thumbnails will slow down a bit. If you're not the type that loses their mind to latency, you should be fine actually.

Very best,

What is desired to necessitate the wireless requirement? Most "super portable solution of a light, small windows tablet" (like a Dell XPS) are likely to have USB 3 which will be far faster than wireless.

kaitanium wrote in post #18300723
...Mainly concerned about speed and responsiveness. Thanks!

Sorry to be blunt but, then why on earth are you looking to do this wirelessly?

It will make your HD which is already the biggest bottleneck in any system, into a very narrow, slow bottleneck. You will certainly slow everything down.

If the drive you work on must be external, just pack a small lightweight USB cable.

Depending on what flavor of wireless, it can be a lot slower than wired, or almost as good. What flavor have you got? (e.g. 802.11b/802.11g/802.11​a/802.11n/802.11ac )
It also depends on how many other users are in your Wifi airspace.
Personally I use wired wherever possible for speed & reliability, and wireless for convenience and portability.

Just seeing whats out there and experiences. You never know about tech advances till you ask. There will be a time when wireless beats wired or can match its capabilities in speed.

Wireless is just easier, instead of getting 3 things out (tablet, cable, hdd) i can take 1 thing out (the tablet) and get going. Especially if on a crowded bus, hopefully at least sitting down, where really theres no space or place for cable that can get snagged on someone elses bag. Oh btw, yes thats my use case. Literally on the go, big city, crowded bus, gotta get work done wherever I am at.

kaitanium wrote in post #18302995
There will be a time when wireless beats wired or can match its capabilities in speed.

Sadly I can't see this ever going to happen, primarily because wireless is a shared medium with multiple devices waiting to access the same RF media (they can't transmit simultaneously), whereas wired (i.e. switched) is nowadays always a point-to-point linkage between two endpoints.

Methinks folks are forgetting that just working with a photo in any software package requires multiple and repeated access to the hard disk. Disk access happens all the time, not just when opening a program or opening/saving a photo.

Wireless example: We just upgraded our DirecTV package. The new receiver requires internet access. The installer tested our connection speed: 21MB/s wired, 6MB/s through our wireless router. We put in a hard-wired connection.

Wireless hard disk may be great for convenience. Speed? Not so much.

joeseph wrote in post #18303107
Sadly I can't see this ever going to happen, primarily because wireless is a shared medium with multiple devices waiting to access the same RF media (they can't transmit simultaneously), whereas wired (i.e. switched) is nowadays always a point-to-point linkage between two endpoints.

Right. And any advances in encoding that can be applied to wireless can be applied to wired. Wired is like having a separate RF spectrum for each link. Wireless is always subject to interference that dramatically reduces the actual throughput. Have you ever seen a wireless connection live up to it's manufacturer's stated maximum? Now have you ever seen a wired connection NOT do so unless there were a major problem with the cable or hardware?

kaitanium wrote in post #18302995
Just seeing whats out there and experiences. You never know about tech advances till you ask. There will be a time when wireless beats wired or can match its capabilities in speed.

Wireless is just easier, instead of getting 3 things out (tablet, cable, hdd) i can take 1 thing out (the tablet) and get going. Especially if on a crowded bus, hopefully at least sitting down, where really theres no space or place for cable that can get snagged on someone elses bag. Oh btw, yes thats my use case. Literally on the go, big city, crowded bus, gotta get work done wherever I am at.

I wouldn't want to be working over a wireless link in a metal box surrounded by everyone else's wireless soup. I also wouldn't want to keep my hard drive charged. Or you could get a tablet like the Microsoft Surface with either a large internal SSD or throw a large micro SD card in the slot.