Leica Q3 Hidden Cost of ownership

[nicci78]

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MBP M1 Pro 2TB internal flash : 

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The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[Qwertynm]

vor 20 Stunden schrieb nicci78:

one working drive. 
one on site backup. 
one off site backup. 

Your ‚working‘ drive doesn’t need to be the fastest for photo editing. I‘d be quite happy with 560MB/s. Neither do the backups. Slow 5400HDDs are fine for onsite backup. I feel like an 8TB nvme SSD for a backup is just a waste of money. If you want to edit photos off of such a drive and you have money to burn, sure why not. But it’s not necessary in my opinion and tests back that up. Look up Art is Right on youtube. He compared a plethora of Mac configurations from MB Air all the way to M2 Ultra Studios. 

[jaapv]

The only issue with slow drives is that the creating of high quality previews can be less than snappy. 

[Qwertynm]

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practical example for why you need more RAM instead of more storage if you want to edit large files and upload them to a photo service to make x-mas presents for your inlaws. Just Lightroom alone clogs up 24-28GB, if you then open photoshop to add borders or something simple your system with 32gb starts swapping memory, which is not ideal. Even if the internal drive reads and writes at 6GB/s.

 

[nicci78]

6GB/sec at the very best is nothing compare to 100GB/sec of the slowest M1/M2/M3 chips. And totally ridiculous compared to 400GB/sec of Max chips memory

Edited December 14, 2023 by nicci78

[nicci78]

On 12/11/2023 at 8:04 PM, Qwertynm said:

Your ‚working‘ drive doesn’t need to be the fastest for photo editing. I‘d be quite happy with 560MB/s. Neither do the backups. Slow 5400HDDs are fine for onsite backup. I feel like an 8TB nvme SSD for a backup is just a waste of money. If you want to edit photos off of such a drive and you have money to burn, sure why not. But it’s not necessary in my opinion and tests back that up. Look up Art is Right on youtube. He compared a plethora of Mac configurations from MB Air all the way to M2 Ultra Studios. 

Actually there is two stories about SSD with QLC tech. They got one very fast but small SLC cache and the rest is über slow. 
When you filled up the cache the QLC SSD will be as slow as a 5400tr/min HDD. Around 120MB/sec
That’s why 8TB TLC are so expensive. They got bigger SLC cache and way faster TLC cells. And they can sustain around 1000MB/sec when the cache is full

as a reminder SLC > MLC > TLC > QLC. In every respects price, performance and reliability  

SLC is best but extremely expensive. MLC is good. TLC is just okay.  QLC is crappy. 
 

Edited December 14, 2023 by nicci78

[Qwertynm]

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vor einer Stunde schrieb nicci78:

6GB/sec at the very best is nothing compare to 100GB/sec of the slowest M1/M2/M3 chips. And totally ridiculous compared to 400GB/sec of Max chips memory

That’s exactly my argument. More RAM > bigger SSD will benefit a photography workflow more. I see 32GB with M chips from apple as the bare minimum. A lot of fast storage is nice to have but not as necessary as enough RAM. And 32 is barely enough to open Lightroom Classic and Photoshop simultaneously as illustrated above. 

[Qwertynm]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb nicci78:

Actually there is two stories about SSD with QLC tech. They got one very fast but small SLC cache and the rest is über slow. 
When you filled up the cache the QLC SSD will be as slow as a 5400tr/min HDD. Around 120MB/sec
That’s why 8TB TLC are so expensive. They got bigger SLC cache and way faster TLC cells. And they can sustain around 1000MB/sec when the cache is full

as a reminder SLC > MLC > TLC > QLC. In every respects price, performance and reliability  

SLC is best but extremely expensive. MLC is good. TLC is just okay.  QLC is crappy. 

This is all really interesting. Can you elaborate how that ties in with the topic? In what workflow does Lightroom for example read files over an extended period of time that cache and then lack of speed would become an issue? Does that not take a huge ge amount of data to be read/written to the disc?

I can’t see how this would affect my workflow. I import images, generate smart previews, then cull images, then cull again, cull again, and again then start editing. Other than on import the files have to be read for a short period and if you generate smart previews the image is already loaded to my understanding.

I keep the current year of images (dng/raw) on my internal drive. The exported jpg goes into the cloud. At the end of the year I move all the raws onto a WD MyBook Drive 24TB that’s set up in Raid1 (2x12). If I want to re-edit an image from a previous year I just drag it from the storage drive to the internal and edit away. 

if you have a high MP camera like the Q2/3 there is certainly a hidden cost of ownership if you shoot raw, want a quick computer and care about data storage. But since you’re reading this in a specific photo forum, that’s probably not news to you (not you @nicci78 in particular, just anyone reading). 

[nicci78]

It matters when you have to move a big chunk of your data. 
when you save your catalog. 
when you are building previews. 
when you work with TIFF files aka analog scans, etc. 
In a word with big files like Q3 or Q2 SSD sustained speed is really important.