Best disk setup for performance in Premiere Pro

[Walter Soyka]

[Mark Jackson] “What i am after is some advice from hopefully and expert or people that have similar systems who can recommend an optimal setup to get the most out of my system for Premier & After Effects CS6 on a Mac…

I was “told” that the following would be a better setup for performance and really just wanted some more opinions on this or even a better configuration:
Applications = 1 x 250Gb 6gb/s SSD ( install this drive in the second optical bay space )
Storage / Media = 6TB Raid 0 (3 x WD 2TB 7200rpm 64m cache 3.5″ HDD) (install in HDD bays 1-3)
Cache Disk = WD 1TB Caviar Black 3.5″ internal on bay 4″

The SSD will be nice for the OS and apps, but it will not run at the full speed, as Mac Pros have only 3 Gbps SATA, not 6. To get the best speed, you’d need a 6 Gbps PCIe host adapter:

https://www.barefeats.com/ssd6g02.html

Storage on a RAID-0 is reasonable for speed, but remember that the failure of a single disk in the set will cause the loss of all data. You should have a backup plan in place.

I’d suggest an SSD for the cache, too — it will make a big difference in Ae.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] “I’d suggest an SSD for the cache, too — it will make a big difference in Ae.”

Walter – is a separate cache drive optimal, or would having it on my high speed media raid work as well?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Walter Soyka]

[Herb Sevush] “Walter – is a separate cache drive optimal, or would having it on my high speed media raid work as well?”

Premiere’s cache and Ae’s cache are two totally different things.

Premiere’s audio pathway is 32-bit floating point, and it writes these “conformed” 32b FP audio files, either into the cache or alongside the media, depending on your preference. Waveform peak (PEK) files are also generated and stored like this.

Ae’s disk cache stores individual frames, both from the final composite as well as the composited layers. If you have a 10-frame comp with 10 layers, you may store 110 individual uncompressed frames in the cache, one each for every frame of every layer in the comp, plus one each for every frame of the final composite. You can imagine how this adds up for longer comps with many layers.

If you store your cache separately from your media, it’s no problem to put the Premiere cache on your media RAID — it’s largely just audio and doesn’t consume too much bandwidth or access time.

However, the Ae cache really benefits from dedicated access to a fast disk with very low latency, since it is making very many constant read and write requests of potentially significant size.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Mark Jackson]

Hi Walter,

Firstly thanks for your clear and direct response to my question as it gave me more assurance that i am on the right track with the setup.

As you recommended i actually have ordered one of those PCIe > 2 x SSD cards that is 6gb/s and can handle two SSD drives on the one card, what i intend to do is use my current SSD for OS and Apps and buy another one to replace my current WD 1TB Caviar Black 3.5″ internal cache drive with that SSD also connected to the PCIe controller at 6gb/s.

My 6TB Striped Raid (3 x WD 2TB 7200rpm 64m cache 3.5″ HDD) is quite fast 500mb/s + so i am quite pleased with that for media storage and rightfully as you said is for speed not redundancy ( i do have a separate workstation ( Mac ) with and identical Raid which backs up every hour through time capsule … and this workstation only backs up ( it does not even have a screen attached to it ) so is fairly much a “glorified NAS drive”, but rather safe than sorry.

Looking forward to your response on my next step above to hear if it is in the right direction…

Kind Regards,

Mark

[Paul St-amand]

Sorry this is off-topic, but how did you get your nVidia Quadro 4000 working with Mavericks? Mine has been a brick since I upgraded; my system reverted to using the stock GT120 card for everything. I’ve been hoping a solution would be forthcoming with the release of 10.9.2, but so far nothing.

Thanks,

Paul

[Mark Jackson]

Hi Paul,

I didn’t do anything special as far as setting up the Quadro, fairly much did a clean install “straight from Mavericks” as i don’t bother to first install Mountain Lion then upgrade as it seems pointless if you know how to boot straight off Mavericks. The only thing “Extra” that i had to do to get the GPU / Cuda working for my Adobe CS6 Master was to install the latest 5.5 Cuda drivers from the nVidia website.

The card should work 100% unless you have upgraded from Mountain Lion the that may be the source of your problems.

Kind Regards,

Mark

[Hugues Gaudreault]

Hello Walter and others from this thread 😉

Same question different flavour Mac Pro Quad Core 3.2Ghz ( 4 cores total ). 32Gb DDR3 Ram, GTX 680 Mac version

Here is what I have in terms of drives, and how I’ve set them up so far, let’s see if you can help me maximize time render times and things for Premiere AE and FCPX. I’d like to set it up for suitable raw and 2k-4k workflows. I’d also like to start using Resolve.

Option 1

Mav: OS and applications: SSD Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
MavRaid: Media and Projects: 4x1TB Raid0
FuDrive: Premiere Media Cache and AE Cache and Preview Files : 620 GB DiY Fusion Drive (128 corsair forge GS + 500 seagate 7200 drive)
BakMavRaid: 4TB seagate (5600)

This resulted in good render times but preview issues…

So I tried

Option 2

Mav:OS and applications: SSD Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
MavRaid: Media and Projects and Preview Files: 4x1TB Raid0 (software)
FuDrive: Media Cache and AE Cache : 620 GB DiY Fusion Drive (128 corsair forge GS +
Bakup RAID 0: 4TB seagate (5600)

This was giving me longer render times and more preview issues

Then I tried

Option 3
Mav: OS and applications: SSD Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
MadRaid: Media and Projects : 4x1TB Raid0
FuDrve: Premiere Media Cache and AE Cache : 620 GB DiY Fusion Drive (128 corsair forge GS +
MavRaidBakup: Preview Files: Bakup RAID 0: 4TB seagate (5600)

This solved preview issues, but I think it gave me slower timeline render times then option 1, but i might be wrong

I’d like to leave the os and app where it is, and wanted to keep the 4TB completely dedicated to back up the RAID0

could I just send back Premiere Media Caches to Mav (500 Gb SSD), Put AE cache and Premiere Preview Files on FuDrv and get better general performance?

I also own:
2TB external USB2 seagate drive that I have partitioned in 3 to Time machine back-up Mav, FuDrve, and 1/3 to clone images.
2TB E-sata G-Drive 7
1TB USB 3 Seagate portable drive

Although I wanted to use the G-drive as a media drive, and the 1TB for cache drive for my MacBook Pro (2009) if they can be of any help…

HG

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