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cmatthias | 3 years ago

> I don't think modern Apple Photos is built to handle slow spinning rust very well.

Apple's software is garbage so I'm sure you're correct, but modern hard drives can do several hundred MB/s of throughput. How is that not fast enough for a freaking photo application? For Apple not to test/support this use case is inexcusable.

discuss

coder543|3 years ago

Modern external hard drives are more like 120MB/s, not "several hundred" MB/s, last I checked, but that's only for sequential access.

Scanning and accessing a photo library is extremely random I/O and has nothing to do with the peak sequential throughput. Hard drives are awful at random I/O.

If Apple kept proper indexes and thumbnails somewhere (especially somewhere fast, like on an SSD), maybe it would be fine, but I have heard some bad things about Apple Photos on hard drives, so they might not be doing things optimally.

compiler-guy|3 years ago

The pain many people experience with using external hard drives and Apple photos is photos building that index and those thumbnails. Huge amounts of io that apparently need to be rebuilt constantly [1]. Probably also happens on SSDs, but you can’t tell because you can’t hear.

1. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251365140 And many, many like it.