Ae partitioned internal cache

[Graham Quince]

Everything I’ve ready suggests two drives are better than one. For years I only had a partitioned cache and I don’t notice much difference now that I have separates BUT the wear-and-tear on a drive being written to is a factor. I beleive SSDs have around 10,000-35,000 write cycles before they fail. And it’s a lot easier to replace a cache drive than replace your single hard drive.

[Brian Cooney]

Thank you!!

[Walter Soyka]

What matters most for cache is speed. Ae measures the performance of the disk cache as it’s used, and when something is faster to retrieve from cache than it is to re-render, Ae caches it to disk. This means the faster your drive is, the more you can benefit from Ae’s cache system.

In the olden days of spinning rust hard drives, this almost always meant dedicating a disk to cache. Other apps competing for disk access and reads reduced cache performance, and Ae would be forced to cache less and re-render more.

With today’s solid-state drives, though, the access and read bottlenecks that mechanical disks faced are gone.

The system drive on a MacBook Pro M1 Max is 7.4 GB/s. That’s incredibly fast. External Thunderbolt SSDs will top out at around 2500-2800 MB/s. That’s also very fast, but the internal drive is still 2-3x faster.

As for SSD wear, it’s real, but do the math. I don’t know if Apple has published anything on write cycles or TBW (terabytes written) for their drives, but your sample “10,000 write cycles” means you could re-write the entire drive once every day for 27 years.

I personally use the NVMe system drive on my PC laptops for the cache.

[Brian Cooney]

Thanks Walter. I was always Mac ….then PC for the last 10 years , now back on Mac again for the company I’m working for. I loved having a number of internal NVMe’s on my PC. So what i hear you saying is, providing my internal Mac drive is large enough (Too bad they don’t allow multiplie drives on a Mac) it would be more than fast enough to split it into 2 partitions, one for storage, IOS and programs, and one for cache. ….. or you may be saying a seperate partition for cache is not even needed. Just write to the same drive single partition.

[Walter Soyka]

Partitioning won’t have an impact on speed. It may be helpful for you personally, but it won’t make a difference to the computer.

Ae is pretty good about making sure its cache doesn’t go beyond the amount you set in preferences. If you have other app’s caches going to that same space, though, then a separate partition might make sense to prevent something from accidentally filling your system drive.

The external Thunderbolt drive is a good option, too, I just personally hate having to connect external disks to a laptop that’s meant to be portable.

[Brian Cooney]

cool yeah agree. I’m working off two 2TB Thunderbolt 3 drives om an iMac in office and then working from home 2 days per week on those same drives from a macbook pro with daily Dropbox backup.