Install DTPO on External Drive

Greetings! I’m the proud recent owner of two licenses of DTPO and am blown away by the potential this software has for me. I’m a trial attorney in the mass-tort/product liability arena and have built a healthy collection of over 2 million files over the past 10 years.

All of my files are stored on a G-Technology G-Drive Pro SSD 3.84TB Thunderbolt 3 drive. The drive is FAST, two m.2 NVME drives in RAID 0. (Yes, I back up to another HDD - Lacie rugged TB3 HDD) To avoid potential bottlenecking, would it be possible to install DTPO directly onto this drive? I can’t imagine this would work because of the multitude of additional files DTPO installs in various locations throughout the Mac HD. Alternatively, would storing the actual database files on the G-Drive serve the purpose I’m looking for?

Don’t know if useful, but my two machines are:
15" Macbook Pro 2.9 Ghz Intel i7 16GB 2133 MHz (Mid-2017) 500GB SSD
iMac 27" 3.5GHz i5 24gb 2400 MHz DDR4 1TB fusion drive (btw hate fusion drives never again)

Both running High Sierra 10.13.6.

Thanks for the learned advice. I’ve spent many hours on this forum and I definitely appreciate all the expert tips and advice out there that has helped me get up and running much more smoothly had I ventured it alone.

DEVONthink should be installed in the /Applications folder. I’m not sure what bottlenecking do you think you’d avoid, but yes, you could put the databases on the external drive, if desired.

I guess my real question is: Is DTPO right for me? As I type, I’m importing 120,000 single page TIFFs and it is taking a very long time. I intend on importing literally millions of files, and bought a $4K external SSD to facilitate. Is this the performance that I should expect with my hardware as outlined above? What hardware improvements could I employ? Thanks again.

Importing 120,000 files in one move isn’t an ideal thing to do. And if you are intending to import millions of files, this would not be something that would easily be performant on most machines.

What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to make my collection of millions of PDFs infinitely more usable by creating databases in DTPO. Most are already OCR’d, and all are organized in a logical fashion relevant to my needs as a trial lawyer. I understand that creating one massive database is possible, though unlikely to be efficient in anyway barring deployment of an AWS grade server in my office.

Do I derive any benefit from having all of my files, and the DTPO databases, on a m.2 nvme external drive, or would an external HDD array in RAID 0 be just as sufficient? The price difference between the two drives is about $3,500 USD. Stated another way, how important is drive read/write speed for optimal use of larger databases? Where will my bottleneck be: ram, processor, somewhere else I’m not thinking?

A fast drive is beneficial in terms of loading and displaying a file, but the more important requirement is RAM. This is also where your “millions of PDFs in databases” may have a critical flaw. You need sufficient RAM to open and keep database indices available for searching.