• Adobe After Effects

  SSD vs. “traditional” HD

  Posted by Paul Roper on March 15, 2013 at 12:06 pm

  Hello,

  I have a couple of ‘normal’ hard disks in my Mac plus* a 500GB SSD. Currently, I have the OS and applications installed on a normal drive, and I use the SSD as cache for After Effects (it’s set to use 300GB) and FCP.

  Am I right in assuming this would provide me with the fastest AE speeds? I’m going to be doing some system re-jigging soon and just wanted to check whether installing the OS and apps on the SSD would speed things up (I assume not). I’m not really that fussed about waiting an extra 10 seconds for an app to start up off a normal drive vs. an SSD.

  Any thoughts?

  – Paul

  *That kinda reads like “Mac Plus”…it’s actually a Mac Pro, not one of these!

  

  Todd Kopriva replied 13 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Todd Kopriva

  March 15, 2013 at 3:30 pm

  If your applications and OS are on the SSD, they will load faster, and this can be worthwhile if you’re opening applications a lot (e.g., bouncing between Illustrator, Photoshop, Cinema 4D, and After Effects). It’s a matter of opinion and preference whether this small but real increase in speed is worth it.

  What is not a matter of opinion is that you should absolutely use the SSD for caches.

  Using the same disk for both applications and caches isn’t a problem, since you are very seldom reading from the cache while also loading an application.

  Don’t waste your single SSD on footage storage. However, if you buy a second SSD, you might find considerable value in keeping a local copy of your footage for your current project on it.

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  Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
  After Effects quality engineering
  After Effects team blog
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