• Adobe After Effects

  After Effects Renders faster to external drive

  Posted by Chris Dortch on September 18, 2008 at 2:14 am

  My computer specs: Mac OS X 2×3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 18 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
  I have four internal hard drives; all 500GB Hitachi DeskStar 7200RPM. All plugged into the hot swappable drive bay inside the mac.
  Drive A: After Effects.app
  Drive B: After Effects Disk Cache and conformed Media Cache
  Drive C: After Effects project file with all assets
  Drive D: This is the drive I render to

  I also have an external OWC drive with hooked up via Firewire 800.

  Rendering to internal Drive D takes longer than rendering to the external OWC.

  Any thought as to why this would be the case?

  Kevin Camp replied 17 years, 8 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Kevin Camp

  September 18, 2008 at 3:31 pm

  since all 4 internal drives are on the same sata2 bus the data is probably bottlenecking at the bus. ae is continually writing and reading cache files, reading the media files and writing the rendered file all through the same bus. so what i think you are seeing is that even though the sata2 bus is faster than the fw800 bus, having the final render written to the fw800 bus is alleviating the bottleneck in the sata2 bus and producing faster renders….

  did that make sense?

  the good news is that your machine is processing so fast that even a very fast drive bus can’t keep up! also, you should see less of a problem with processing intense projects, where your drive bus will be better able to keep up with the processors taking more time to render each frame.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  Chris Dortch

  September 18, 2008 at 3:51 pm

  Thanks for the intelligent response. I am sure you are right. I guess if apple would have given each drive its own bus I would not be having this problem. Right? Thanks again.
• 

  Kevin Camp

  September 18, 2008 at 8:03 pm

  [Chris Dortch] “I guess if apple would have given each drive its own bus I would not be having this problem. Right?”

  yes, but that would be a rather unusual and more expensive mother board design.

  you can get a pci-e sata2 controller and use that for with external sata2 drive or drive array (or with a little work, install 2 more internal drives in the 2nd optical bay with a 3rd party kit and run internal sata cables to connect those drives to the sata2 card). you could use a couple of your existing internal drives in a sata2 drive enclosure (or in the optical bay) to save some money on new drives.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up