New PC planned - data disc SSD SATA-3 or SSD M.2?

[spiff]

Hello,

is use a 2011 PC and need a new one. I think about what kind of SSD i need for my pictures to give imatch the best kick. At my current system i have for the system a SSD at SATA-3 and my pictures on a WD40EZRZ hard disc. The hard disc reaches up to 180 MB/s for large files, but during Metada write back commands it ist about 30MB/s says my task manager. It feels like it is even slower (user benchmark says 1,63MB/s random 4k speed for my hard disc).

For my new PC i will choose a M.2 SSD for Windows and software, my WD40EZRZ hard disc as backup disc, and for the datas i struggle if a 4T SSD SATA-3 is good enough, or a 4T M.2 is much better. Is someone of you experienced in this? 4 Terabyte is much enough for the next years.

[Jingo]

Just to help you out.. I recently built a new PC and went with the following "mid-range" tier and am very happy with my IM performance.. anything more than this is gravy IMO!

Windows Drive - 1TB M.2 -> C drive
  Houses Windows AND my IMatch Database/Preview Cache [I'm a JPG only user so my cache is quite small as I have it turned off for JPG's]

Photo Drive - 14 TB 7200 Spin
  ~87000 Photos are stored in a partition and take up about 1 TB - again.. JPG only.

Backup Drive(s) - 10 TB 7200 Spin Drive
  - 5 partitions used to backup my databases, client drive work, IMatch photo drive, RAW photo drive, Boot Drive Clone, etc

I have 2 other re-purposed SSD drives for Indesign Client work and Gaming... along with 1 other 10 TB 7200 spin drive... all in all, I think I have 17 partitions available across all the drives... many empty but available for small chunk usage.

Enjoy!

[abgestumpft]

Hi,

I did some test with adding files to iMatch and writing metadata on different disks.
Importing & Writing Metadata is also CPU intensive, so this also plays a role.

My setup is:
AMD Ryzen 3700x
32GB RAM
iMatch catalog and image cache is running on c: = NVMe SSD


For the test I was using the same folder with 1056 files (ca 781 .ORF Olympus RAW files and 270 JPGs)

1. I imported the folders one by one to iMatch ("Import Files" in table below)
Import consists of two parts:
a) Import Metadata
b) Adding and updating Files

2. Writeback Metadata of 883 files
Writeback right after import of files (883 files marked for writeback)

3. Writeback Metadata of 1056 files
Assigned a keyword to all files and then writeback metadata


Here the results from my testing:



My interpretation of the results:
1. Import
a) Import Metadata:
even with 32 threads (maximum possible in iMatch) a lot of CPU and Disk resources are free.
Therefore import of metadata runs ca. same time on all disks -> maybe iMatch should allow 64 or so here?
b) Adding and updating Files:
With 12 threads the CPU is the bottleneck for all SSDs, but for HDD the disk is the bottleneck.
In general import time is the same on all SSDs types while HDD is slower due to longer "Adding and updating files"

2. Writeback Metadata of 883 files & 3. Writeback Metadata of 1056 files
In general the disk is the bottleneck here:
a) SATA SSD is slightly faster than having iMatchcatalog and Fotos on the same NVMe SSD
b) NVMe SSD (different that iMatch catalog) is ca. 2x as fast as SATA SSD
c) HDD: is by far the slowest here

[spiff]

Thank you very much. Because your test i consider to store my pictures on a PCIe SSD in future. At the moment i search for good providers for tower PC´s. If you have an advice i would appreciate it.