• Adobe After Effects

  How many Drives should i use for best AE CS6 Performance ?

  Posted by Mazzaro Stefano on January 6, 2016 at 5:02 pm

  Hi Folks,

  Well, I am setting a new storage configuration to improve Global Performance in AE CS6.

  From what I understand, the best disk configuration would be :

  1 SSD for Operating System + After Effect CS6
  1 SSD for Footage Files (active project)
  1 SSD for Disk Cache
  1 SSD for Rendered Output

  So we have here 4 SSD’s. I will probably use a 5th disk (HDD) to store finished Projects.
  Am I right ?

  Thanks for help
  Stef

  Tero Ahlfors replied 10 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Mazzaro Stefano

  January 6, 2016 at 7:25 pm

  Thank you Dave.

  But from what I learned, SSD’s are recommended for faster memory access and fast Read/Write speed.

  I went to this conclusion : in order to avoid the drives to read and write simultaneously. Wouldn’t this configuration reduce render time ?

  Also, I’m not sure what do you mean by using ” a nice external array ” ?

  Sorry English is not my native language.

  I appreciate your help
  Stef
• 

  John Cuevas

  January 7, 2016 at 4:00 pm

  I built a 4 SSD configuration, similar to what you are building. On some projects extremely complicated projects, I do get a bump in rendering times compared to our other systems in the office. If I could go back though, I probably would have done 1-2 SSD drives and one large HDD for source and rendering and then invested the difference on my CPU’s. Just my 2 cents.

  Johnny Cuevas, Editor
  ThinkCK

  “I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
  —THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.
• 

  Mazzaro Stefano

  January 7, 2016 at 4:39 pm

  I am surprised not to find any benchmark on the internet that shows the performance of a 1 disk configuration vs multi-disk configuration ..

  While Adobe recommends the exclusive use of 1 SSD for cache disk, others users advise 1 disk only for render, 1 disk only for sources, etc..

  My questions are :

  – Will preview and render really improve with multi-disk config ? (so get better workflow)
  – What would be this improvement 5% 10% 15% … ?

  Thank you Johnny for sharing your experience, it really helps me !

  If any others have some clue on this, please feel free to share.

  Thanks
  Stef
• 

  Tero Ahlfors

  January 8, 2016 at 5:02 am

  You will get redundancy and speed with a RAID. If you have a RAID 5 setup you can lose one drive and still have all the data. If one of your SSD’s malfunctions that’s it.

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