I’m thinking of getting an 2Tb external SSD usb-c drive.
I’m still on DT4.8 and I want to migrate my photos + xmps from the internal SSD to the external SSD. The DT catalog would stay on the internal SSD, but the photos would be moved the external SSD.
I would first wonder why not upgrade to DT5.0 and going forward always keep up to date. As for the question about the speed of the process of moving the images from one drive to the next that depends mainly on your computer’s read/write speeds to the drive, but it would be very reasonable to do what you propose. I would suggest doing it when you are not under time pressure and it can take as long as it takes. I have moved hundreds of GB of images across drives and it can take a little time, but nothing too crazy.
Would DT be fast enough to browse/scroll the light table without the delays?
I have tried with a ‘real’ external drive (spin/platters) and it’s too slow to browse a collection with more than 100 images. It was cursor down, wait, wait… cursor down.
Yes, you can keep your existing db, move the whole raw directory structure, then tell dt to update the location, see darktable 4.8 user manual - collections
Should be fast enough, but depends a lot on your hardware. Browsing is mostly about where you thumbnail cache is located.
I defer to what more knowledgeable people will say on this topic, but I suspect your delay has to do with DT building the thumbnail previews and maybe a setting in the lighttable preferences may help with this. That may be less to do with the external drive and more the need for DT to create thumbnails to display.
EDIT: I just did a quick test with a folder containing over 400 images on my external drive. Using just the import feature DT is taking a long time to build the initial thumbnails. Once they are built however the scrolling process is quick.
Hi, I use this setup every day. For my usage of dt it’s fine but scrolling down larger collections 100+ of raw images can be slow. In my case 61mp raws show the limits. The faster the USB Drive and the USB port on your computer the better it works.
I have a standard 4TB SSD 2,5“ on a fast USB 3.1 adapter cable and connect it to the computers fastest USB 3.1 ports. Using it with older 16mp or 24mp raws is very snappy but the larger 61mp raws can test my patience. It’s enough for me, but I am not a professional photographer, I just like to move my collection (disk) between different computers and that counts more for me than ultimate speed.
Sorry side question. My internal harddrive is filling up faster than expected. So I can move the Darktable folder with image files to an external drive and update the collections as per the manual?