Question Uploading photos from card to SSD

[TiCoyote]

I have been running into problems uploading photos from a CFexpress card to my SSD. It just seems to take a very long time.

I'm transferring around 1000 photos, and it's usually around 40gb. The transfer starts fasts, and the progress bar says something like 180mb/s. Then it drops down to 20mb/s, then it will stop entirely. After that, it goes back and forth between 0mb/s and 80mb/s, in a regular wave. The entire transfer can take as much as 20-30min.

The the SSD is a 1TB Sandisk, and it generally has 100-300 gb of free space. Also, I should point it out that it is my system disk. Is that what's causing the bottleneck?

For comparison, I tried a similar transfer onto my non-system disk, with is a HDD. The transfer took around 4min, and it occurred at a regular speed with relatively little variation. Does it tranfer faster because it's the non-system disk, or because it's a HDD?

If I put the photos on a non-system disk, and then I edit them in Lightroom, will Lightroom run more slowly?

 

[geofelt]

SSD devices are very fast when reading.
When writing, it can slow down.
In part because fast buffers get filled quickly and data then needs to be written to the underlying nand blocks.
On your system C drive, most blocks will already have some data written to them.
That requires a read then rewrite to output the photo.

Hard drives are excellent for photo and video storage.
System drive, or not, performance should be similar.
Cost per gb is much less. When data is written to a hard drive sequentially it is reasonably fast.

What to do?
If you will need to access the photos frequently then put up with the longer load time.
Otherwise pick the HDD for storage.

And... Do you have external backup for these photos?

 

[kanewolf]

I have been running into problems uploading photos from a CFexpress card to my SSD. It just seems to take a very long time.

I'm transferring around 1000 photos, and it's usually around 40gb. The transfer starts fasts, and the progress bar says something like 180mb/s. Then it drops down to 20mb/s, then it will stop entirely. After that, it goes back and forth between 0mb/s and 80mb/s, in a regular wave. The entire transfer can take as much as 20-30min.

The the SSD is a 1TB Sandisk, and it generally has 100-300 gb of free space. Also, I should point it out that it is my system disk. Is that what's causing the bottleneck?

For comparison, I tried a similar transfer onto my non-system disk, with is a HDD. The transfer took around 4min, and it occurred at a regular speed with relatively little variation. Does it tranfer faster because it's the non-system disk, or because it's a HDD?

If I put the photos on a non-system disk, and then I edit them in Lightroom, will Lightroom run more slowly?

Moving 1000s of files with USB is very slow. Copying 1000s of files from one SSD to another is not fast. Windows is great with a few large files but not efficient with 1000s of files.

 

[Gururu]

Yesterday I had to move 128 GB of photos from 1 SATA m.2 to a 64 GB microSD and to a NVME m.2 on a different computer. It took me about 2 hour of total copy time to the microSD and about half hour from microSD to the NVME.

 

[Bob.B]

I have been running into problems uploading photos from a CFexpress card to my SSD. It just seems to take a very long time.

I'm transferring around 1000 photos, and it's usually around 40gb. The transfer starts fasts, and the progress bar says something like 180mb/s. Then it drops down to 20mb/s, then it will stop entirely. After that, it goes back and forth between 0mb/s and 80mb/s, in a regular wave. The entire transfer can take as much as 20-30min.

The the SSD is a 1TB Sandisk, and it generally has 100-300 gb of free space. Also, I should point it out that it is my system disk. Is that what's causing the bottleneck?

For comparison, I tried a similar transfer onto my non-system disk, with is a HDD. The transfer took around 4min, and it occurred at a regular speed with relatively little variation. Does it tranfer faster because it's the non-system disk, or because it's a HDD?

If I put the photos on a non-system disk, and then I edit them in Lightroom, will Lightroom run more slowly?

Is optimize/trim enabled for the ssd?

Is device manager write caching policy enabled for the ssd?

 

[TiCoyote]

Is optimize/trim enabled for the ssd?

Yes.

Is device manager write caching policy enabled for the ssd?

Yes.

 

[TeamRed2024]

Hard drives are excellent for photo and video storage.
System drive, or not, performance should be similar.
Cost per gb is much less. When data is written to a hard drive sequentially it is reasonably fast.

Indeed. That's why I still have my 7 year old 12TB HDD. It's been an amazing backup drive. I recently copied 7TB of .mp4 video files (1500 or so total files) from one of my 2.5 SSDs to the HDD... it took 6 hours... and I didn't even care... I set it up to copy when I went to bed.

 

[Bob.B]

Yes.

Yes.

Run a disk benchmark on the ssd see if it shows somewhere around normal.

Trying to copy to the system disk might be a problem depending on what else is running.

 

[TiCoyote]

What if I got a M.2 drive? Would that be faster? The SSD is SATA.

 

[USAFRet]

What if I got a M.2 drive? Would that be faster? The SSD is SATA.

No.

Performance and throughput depends on the slowest device in the chain.

Source drive, interface, cables, target drive.

Having an uberfast target drive does not change the rest of it.

 

[lantis3]

The performance of SSD that does not have on board dram drops dramatically after some amount of files been copied. Probably any cheaper product with 3 years warranty or less all do this.

SSD brand/model?

 

[TiCoyote]

It is a Sandisk Ultra 3D 1TB. SDSSDH3-1T00-G26

 

[TiCoyote]

No.

Performance and throughput depends on the slowest device in the chain.

Source drive, interface, cables, target drive.

Having an uberfast target drive does not change the rest of it.

But I think the issue IS the target drive. The SATA SSD. Wouldn't an M.2 NVMe be faster than the SATA?

 

[Bob.B]

But I think the issue IS the target drive. The SATA SSD. Wouldn't an M.2 NVMe be faster than the SATA?

Did you benchmark the target drive like I asked above?

 

[JeffreyP55]

The fastest your SATA device can transfer data is 6.0 Gbit/s. However, those are more marketing numbers. Your speed may vary. So, no matter how fast your M.2 drive may be, data transfer will never exceed 6.0 Gbit/s.