There is no way she is working with 4TB of photos on a regular basis. Keeping all of that stuff around, probably 10’s or 100’s of thousands of photos is of course going to be slow.

Cool thing with Lightroom is you can export photos as a catalog file and retain the negatives with that export. For archival purposes, you would do exactly that and export to your NAS, then delete the photos you just exported from the main catalog (of course, after checking they were exported to a new catalog successfully by loading that catalog in Lightroom).

That will keep the photo edits in the lrcat database and the original negatives intact. Goal is to shrink your working catalog down to something more manageable.

PS, Lightroom can import photos from a camera and sort into year month day folders. This is setup at import time.

Photos can also be reorganized as such by creating folders and moving photos directly in Lightroom itself. Unfortunately I do not think there is an automatic way to do this, but I have my pictures organized by year, then month, then day and can remember having to fix that in the past when Lightroom was reinstalled onto a new computer and those import settings weren’t remembered.

Pretty confident these are not SMR. In 8 drive raidz2 it’s about 24-36 hours to rebuild for me.

Resilvering a 8TB drive is naturally going to take longer than 2TB…